

Gay on Facebook: Nowhere to Hide - edw519
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/02/the-digital-closet.html

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michael_dorfman
I think the article is missing the point.

It's not that you can't have a secret and be on Facebook-- it's that you can't
have anybody who knows your secret be on Facebook.

Put another way: even if "Joe" (from the article) were not on Facebook, that
wouldn't have stopped someone from posting a comment about his boyfriend.

People talk about other people. You can't control what they say. If these
people are publishing their comments (to their "friends", or on blogs, to the
general public), you're shit out of luck.

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brown9-2
Furthermore, the example outlined in the opening could have just as easily
happened in an overheard real-life conversation rather than online.

 _Joe was upset with our friend for sending the tweet, the content of which
was a bit careless but totally benign, and my response to him was a
combination of devil’s advocacy and good old-fashioned tough love._

Joe's friend could have been just as careless (or ignorant about his sexuality
being a secret) by making a comment in front of people who were not aware of
the secret.

The issue isn't being online, or Facebook or Twitter - the issue is keeping a
secret.

edit: whoops, thenduks made the same exact argument I made here, but better

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marcusbooster
It could be mitigated if Facebook offered real privacy controls, mainly
keeping our social circles separate from each other like we do in real life.
I'd like the option: if a member of network X posts on my wall, members from
network Y and Z should not be able to see it.

But that would require real privacy controls and it goes against Facebook's
absurd mission statement to open up the entire world (or whatever that
embroidery is inside that dopey hoodie).

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tjmaxal
The idea that you can't really keep secrets on the internet shouldn't really
be news to anyone. Especially not here.

That being said, I think most people's privacy is kept because there just
aren't that many people interested in you in general. Unless you do something
to make yourself a target.

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pavel_lishin
I think Scott Adams said something like this in The Dilbert Future; he claimed
that privacy in the future won't be a huge issue because we're all so boring.

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CodeMage
_Keeping an eagle eye on tagged photos_

This is one of the things that goes beyond Facebook as a platform and
technology and becomes a cultural issue. You can delete your Facebook account
or never get on Facebook in the first place, but that won't stop people from
publishing photos of you on it. I can't help feeling it has become socially
acceptable for your friends or even acquaintances to publish photos of you on
the Internet.

 _Facebook is now an integral part of our culture. Its precipitous growth is
owed to the fact that it works only if it’s massive. The more people
participate, the more utility it has, and the more utility it has, the more
compulsory participation becomes._

And _this_ is precisely why so many people are making a fuss about Facebook's
privacy policy and attitude towards privacy. Whether we all like it or not,
Facebook has become a part of our global culture and it influences the way we
think and behave. If part of its influence is to encourage you to stop caring
about your privacy -- or even to simply refrain from reminding you to take
care of it -- then we won't need to worry about anyone taking our privacy
away; we, the society, will give it up on our own.

~~~
JadeNB
> Facebook is now an integral part of our culture. Its precipitous growth is
> owed to the fact that it works only if it’s massive. The more people
> participate, the more utility it has, and the more utility it has, the more
> compulsory participation becomes.

I came to mention exactly this same sentence. Maybe it's just that I'm out of
the loop—but I'm 30, not a complete technological outsider, and I have never
used Facebook or felt any pressure to do so. In what sense is this
participation compulsory? I'd have liked to see some more elaboration on this
principle that seems often to be taken for granted.

(I'd particularly be interested to hear an argument that couldn't also have
been applied to AOL in the early '90's—I really did consider it vital to be
there to communicate with out-of-state friends without enormous phone bills,
but the notion nowadays of participation in AOL being compulsory is
laughable.)

~~~
CodeMage
It's not really compulsory in the sense that someone is making you
participate. It's simply the peer pressure. Here's some "anecdata" to
illustrate the point: I don't have a Facebook account anymore, but my wife
does. Anyone among my friends and family who wants to see my son's photos is
told to go to my wife's photo gallery. Sure, we could use Picasa or Flickr or
even e-mail, but she's already using Facebook and it's easier that way. So if
a friend or family member wants to see the photos and doesn't have a Facebook
account, they have an additional small incentive to get one.

Facebook has become one of those things everyone mentions now and then. You
can use it to keep in touch with high school friends (even those you didn't
like in the first place), to exchange gossip, to kill time (if you think
mindlessly watching TV is the worst you can do with your time, think again),
etc. If everyone around you uses it for something and mentions it often
enough, you'll feel left out of that. Those of us who can say "well, I'm glad
to be left out of _that_ " are a minority.

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thenduks
I fail to see how a friend posting a comment exposing the relationship on
facebook is any different than that same friend making the same kind of
comment while out for drinks 'IRL'.

This has nothing to do with 'social media'.

~~~
raganwald
When someone comments while out for drinks, three people hear it. They may
tell a few people, and the word will get around within a circle of friends who
know each other.

It may never reach other circles of your friends. In my own case, the circle
of my FB friends that I know from technology do not overlap with the circle of
friends that I know from sports very much. Something could easily go around
one circle and not the other.

But FB merges them: Something on my wall is visible of all of my circles of
friends. That's what I took from the article: Social Media kicks down the
walls between circles of friends.

~~~
thenduks
Of course you are right: There is almost certainly going to be a difference in
the magnitude of a 'breach'.

I still think this is way out of proportion. Let's use the example of your two
circles. Assuming a few/some/most/all of your friends are in the same
geographical area, how common is it to run into people from group A while out
with group B (and thus open the possibility of group A people making comments
you don't want group B to hear)? I know for me situations like this are very
common. Just the other day I was leaving a restaurant with friends and ran
into other completely unrelated friends who were sitting on the patio.

I don't think that just because Facebook is an _easier_ way for your
clueless/inconsiderate friends to let stuff slip is Facebook's problem, is all
I'm saying. Facebook is just the highest profile, most widely used method of
having a persona online. That comes with upsides and downsides -- if you
aren't comfortable with the risks you can simply not partake.

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psyklic
The article missed perhaps the easiest way to surmise if someone is gay on
Facebook -- mutual friends. If you both are gay, you probably have the same
gay mutual friends.

Ever since I started adding gay people, I started getting friend requests from
other random gay people (I'm assuming who use Facebook for dating).

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Sam_Odio
This smacks of link bait & bandwagoning. The author's experience with Twitter
is contorted to support a statement about Facebook.

The FUD among the mainstream press is getting a little tiresome and distracts
from the real privacy issues on the site. Instead I'd prefer to see a concrete
discussion of exactly what controls/features are broken - that's much more
actionable on my end.

Disclaimer: I work for Facebook, but don't speak on their behalf.

~~~
meh2themeh
I think you just misunderstood the article. This isn't FUD, mostly because it
wasn't an attack on Facebook, not even slightly, and also is entirely true.

I am gay and have noticed exactly what the author is talking about with myself
and many others. I don't write anything ever on Facebook (sorry, it bores me
to tears, I don't hold Facebook use against anyone though :), but it is
completely obvious from my mutual friends, from the fact that my profile says
who my boyfriend is, etc, that I am gay.

It is a simple fact that Facebook (and other social networks to a lesser
extent), blur together social circles that otherwise never would have blended.
For example, both sides of my extended family in totally different areas of
the country friend me. These are people who I never bothered to formally come
out to (because we aren't in reality that close). Simply accepting their
invite is also an act of uncloseting. For someone who actually _is_ in the
closet, that degree of uncloseting is possibly very uncomfortable, and hard to
know if you are even doing it (is it obvious or not from my mutual friends
that I'm gay?). This absolutely is not a kind of thing that happened in the
pre-social network world.

But, this also is not, in any way, because of Facebook privacy problems or
controls or whatever. It is an inherent property of the kind of very
transparent, mixed "all social circles are one social circle" model that
Facebook (and other social network sites) have. Maybe other people don't
notice this as much because a lot of gay people (especially closeted gay
people) were more used to having extremely disjoint social groups which the
online world suddenly makes dramatically less disjoint.

Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, the author writes about this
as a positive thing, because it makes the closet much harder to choose, since
the traditional problem of policing your life to your closet door closed
becomes so much harder. The author interprets this in the end as being a
social positive since coming out is in a way a political and socially
influential act.

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CapitalistCartr
Why on Earth do people have only one Facebook profile? If the software doesn't
provide for better separation automatically, do it manually. Imagine it's a
CLI and you have to write the commands yourself.

~~~
vsync
Because Facebook only allows you to have one profile and requires you to use
your real name.

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lotharbot
Facebook's terms of service say that, but I haven't seen any indication that
they enforce it.

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noarchy
I don't think they would enforce it, unless someone went out of their way to
rat someone out for doing it. I personally know a few folks who have multiple
Facebook accounts, and have long-considered doing it, too.

