I'm a new parent and my wife and I are not taking any measures to minimize our kid's Facebook exposure.
As a general rule, it's pretty safe to "do what everybody else is doing." If Facebook albums parents made for kids when they were little come back to haunt this coming generation as a group, the ills will be remedied either by making or using certain sorts of analysis illegal (the college application hypothetical) or society will adapt by adjusting perceptions of certain information (the prom date hypothetical).
It is illustrative to note how the national reaction to youth drug use in presidential candidates changed from Clinton ("I didn't inhale") to G.W.B. to Obama ("maybe a little blow"). Similar adaptation will happen when it comes to information on Facebook and the like.
As a general rule, it's pretty safe to do "what everybody else is doing."
I noticed this rule after the housing crash. If one person was underwater on their mortgage, no one would blink. But, when hundreds of thousands of people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) provide relief.
It seems impossible to limit someone's exposure on Facebook, especially when any 3rd party will happily post a photo of your family member online. I also suspect that untagging a person on FB is analogous to FB's soft-deleting of statuses. The damage is already done.
>I noticed this rule after the housing crash. If one person was underwater on their mortgage, no one would blink. But, when hundreds of thousands of people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) provide relief.
Considering that hundrends of thousadns still lost their houses, it's not much of a comfort -- or good advice in general.
"Do what everybody else is doing" will at best lead to mediocre results (by definition).
Consider the effect of such an advice to someone in a slum neighborhood where "everybody" is dealing drugs, to get the worst case scenario.
Yes, doing what everybody else is doing will lead to mediocre results by definition. But it will also minimize social friction (important!) and give you herd protection against certain kinds of downside risk.
There was an article recently that said that startups shouldn't innovate in non-core areas. This is precisely the advice of "do what everyone else is doing" at least for certain things.
Considering that hundreds of thousands still lost their houses
Hundreds of thousands also had portions of their mortgages forgiven. One can also not deny that the Fed is keeping interest rates low, in part, because many home owners have HELOCs or other adjustable rate loans.
I agree with you that "doing what everybody else is doing" is not a free pass to be reckless and is not something to aspire to do.
If I'm on a bridge, and people are jumping off en masse, then one of two things is happening:
1. They've all been mentally affected, in which case, I almost certainly am too, or;
2. They know something I don't.
It's disingenuous to throw out a contrived example of a herd of people nonsensically jumping off a bridge. If that many people are jumping off a bridge, you probably should too, because they probably know something you don't (yet).
There was a great Dilbert that had his mum asking him the "if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" question. His response was along the lines of "if they all came back and told me how awesome it was, yes".
Thank you, this puts a great twist on the situation.. basically saying that if all of his generally smart, sane friends all of a sudden jumped off a bridge, most likely there was a REALLY good reason behind why they did it
Then again, when everyone else is safe in the water and you're the last one on the bridge when the train comes through, you might feel a bit silly in the moments before your untimely demise.
If everybody in a neighborhood is dealing marijuana and then you show up and starting dealing heroin, a sudden increase in police activity and interest should not be surprising.
>But, when hundreds of thousands of people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) provide relief.
Yeah, I was almost afraid that I had bought too small of a house, knowing that I would have to pay for my share of the mortgage bailout in extra taxes and value lost to inflation, I might as well buy the most ridiculous crib I could get financing for. Right? But then it came to pass that those bailout programs never really did much for underwater and overextended homeowners. Of course, none of that really makes me feel better, except that I can still afford my mortgage.
That's my whole beef with the "underwater" thing. They seemed to think that house was worth the price they signed up to pay when they did it. Now those houses are not worth as much. Too bad, so sad. I think I should get congress to bail me out on buying a new car. It certainly is not worth as much as it was when I purchased it.
> It seems impossible to limit someone's exposure on Facebook,
I don't think anyone is forced to use it. I know several families who have account, yet, they don't share on it or use it for anything that could be embarrassing in the later years.
> especially when any 3rd party will happily post a photo of your family member online.
You should always explain to your friends what your expectation of privacy is. If they don't respect that, they are not your friends anyway.
I agree that society will adapt, but I wonder what will happen when people from different generations compete for the same jobs. To some extent we're beginning to see this with various hand-wringing about millennials.
It also has countless unspoken successes every single day. I have eliminated a great deal of the social clutter and hassle in my life by making a conscious effort to do what other people are doing, unless I have a reason not to. Everyone else is dancing at a party? Dance as well, even if it isn't your thing. Nobody else wears sandals to work? Don't either. Everyone else is driving home from the bar? Well... actually you had to much, take a cab instead.
Don't break the mold without a proper reason to. Now, are privacy issues going to come back and bit kids today in the ass? Maybe, I know I haven't always used my real name online, most people from my generation haven't. I figure that the kids who do are the ones breaking the mold now... I'm on the edge in that case.
Doing what everyone else is doing lowers social friction. We're discussing the idea of doing something while a child is young (posting about them online) that could haunt them later in life. If everyone is doing this, the social friction in the future will be less about having your childhood online.
In this case, the social friction itself is what would be possibly causing issues in the future, so lowering it would be improving the situation.
If you want to reference the Nazis, then it's the same thing. Doing what everyone was doing had lower social friction in Nazi Germany.
If registering your religious affiliation in your identity papers was what everyone was doing, maybe it lowered social friction, but in the long run it caused huge problems for a certain group of people when the government suddenly started tracking them down, and had very good tools to do so.
Whether or not this is a good or valid comparison, I think the argument about "if everyone are sharing, nobody will care" is plain wrong. In the right circumstances, it will always be possible to find some nugget of information to paint you in a bad light or cause you problems.
Either way, it's going to be very interesting to watch our future politicians lives be completely exposed down to the smallest detail, as it may be 20-30 years from now.
Yep, that's the problem. As a general rule, driving without a seatbelt is also pretty safe.. until it's not. The question is whether the advantage you get from something is bigger than the potential consequences.
I'd say, given the historical track record of governments during the last 100 years, that it's very gullible to believe that whatever future problems our current data sharing will cause will somehow be "fixed" and not have consequences just as long as it affects a critical mass of the population.
"I'd say, given the historical track record of governments during the last 100 years, that it's very gullible to believe that whatever future problems our current data sharing will cause will somehow be "fixed" and not have consequences just as long as it affects a critical mass of the population."
For that matter, parts of our government like the NSA and the DEA consider the over-sharing of personal data on Facebook to be a useful source of exploitable information. They'd probably quietly lobby against any legislation to scale it back.
Exatly. A major argument used in the debate about new data retention laws in Europe was just this: That in face of changing subscription types like prepaid cards, the police needed data retention to still have access to the same data as before.
Personally I do want to push them to be fixed if possible. I don't like real name policies, but I do consider anonymity only a workaround most of the time.
Right, why give your child a leg-up on all those kids that have had every second of their life broadcast online, when you can milk it for the next dozen years and let it be their problem, in the future?
As a general rule, it's pretty safe to "do what everybody else is doing." If Facebook albums parents made for kids when they were little come back to haunt this coming generation as a group, the ills will be remedied either by making or using certain sorts of analysis illegal (the college application hypothetical) or society will adapt by adjusting perceptions of certain information (the prom date hypothetical).
It is illustrative to note how the national reaction to youth drug use in presidential candidates changed from Clinton ("I didn't inhale") to G.W.B. to Obama ("maybe a little blow"). Similar adaptation will happen when it comes to information on Facebook and the like.