The Internet and You
Okay so watched f8 today.
F8 is the developer’s conference for Face.book where they announce new baseline features for developers to work against.
Here’s the new profile they’ll unveil soon :
And the enhanced Apps :
I tried it out myself and I gotta admit, it’s pretty cool.
I’ve heard both good and bad things about these new features. Some people are really excited while others are whining as usual about Face.book’s Agile development cycle penchant for revamping things every other day. Haven’t heard the standard privacy whines yet, but I’m sure that’s coming.
As you know, I’ve been a techie pretty much my whole life. Born and raised with a keyboard in my hand. Came of age during this computer era and live and breathe it. Went to school for it…switched majors…but ended up studying its impact on society. Now I study this stuff and the best ways to get people to work with it in the fields of User Experience and Usability.
As someone who does this for a living and as hobby (not employed on this site clearly), I’m here to tell you the thing that 82.3% of computer users do not get.
THE INTERNET IS NOT, WAS NOT, AND HAS NEVER BEEN MADE FOR YOU!
EVERY WEBSITE EVER CREATED WAS MADE TO PUSH THE AGENDA OF ITS CREATORS!
And this coming from a person who does Ux and Usability for a living!
The secret of those disciplines…to make it easier to push the agenda down your throat.
Period.
Yeah I said it!
Knowing this, I SMH at people that complain when new technology comes out or when they have issues with Privacy on websites yet will tell people all about their sex lives on twitter. Technology can only do what you allow it to do AND you control what you are exposed to or the agendas you deal with.
Always.
If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
Or if you want your stuff to be more private, set the settings up to be more private.
There is always a way to lock down your stuff. Always.
And it isn’t actually that difficult if you read the instructions. Things aren’t as hidden as you would believe because someone on twitter said so.
I noticed Face.book was posting my things as Public domain on the new profile. Solution, click “Public” and change it to “Friends”.
Simple.
Also, a big problem is that people don’t read those Terms of Service (TOS) prompts anymore. They got used to the long legalese of the software TOS of yesteryear and always click through assuming the internet ones are the same.
They are not.
Read the small print.
Like I’ve said before, when you get “hacked” you weren’t actually hacked. You yourself gave permission to an app to post information through your account.
Read those permissions dialogs on your mobile gadgets (phones and tablet PC’s) and on your websites and web apps (Face.book and Twitter Apps and/or Air applications).
They will tell you what you’re giving them permission to do.
In some cases, you can even go back and disallow certain things…like on Face.book you can allow Sp.otify to share what you’re listening to, but not update your status.
Now to bring it back to that comic.
Again, websites are not made for you. They’re made to push the agenda of the creators.
Face.book is a multi-million (billion?) dollar COMPANY. The costs of running a server that hosts the information and media files of almost a billion people are HUGE! To give you an idea, the cost of hosting a plain static HTML site from yesteryear on its own server in the govie sector is 40K/year. And this type of site would MAYBE get 500 hits a month. Costs come from the server cabinet, personnel for setup and upkeep, auditing, security, etc.
Face.book gets probably 500 hits every millisecond or something…their costs are (40K x some ridiculous number). I wouldn’t be surprised if it costs them hundreds of millions a year across tons of servers to host that site. That takes MONEY. They need MONEY.
So there’s that.
Then, again, Face.book is a COMPANY. It’s not something someone’s doing out of the kindness of their heart. They are in it to make MONEY.
The way they’ve spun their model though is to make Face.book the hub of the entire Internet to make the Internet as “social” as real life, if not more so…enabling us to see what our friends are listening to/watching/doing 24/7 and share our lives via the internet.
On their money side, they sell ad space to companies who crowd source using people’s profiles. They use the statistics about what people are listening to/watching/doing to serve them ads based on their activities.
Then since people who don’t have ad blockers actually do click on ads (which blows MY mind) those advertisers and Face.book get RICH.
For those of us that don’t do the ad thing, they come at us a different way…using branded apps like Nike’s run trackers or Hulu and thangs to get us in a less obvious way.
So yeah, we’re products in a way… but while it’s true you’re not paying for Face.book, you are still getting a service, many different ones in fact. It’s a way to share your life with your friends, a way to learn about new products and services related to your interests, a way to crowd source people you’re connected with to see how people think about certain topics, etc. You as a user can get a lot out of Faceb.ook yourself!
So yeah…in general, the Internet isn’t about you. Recognize that and adjust expectations accordingly.
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