Having
a Facebook gives me a sense of identity, and I only have one just in case
someone wants to look me up and contact me.
So to sum it up, I only have a profile to provide my friends and family
another medium to contact me. I don't
update my friends on what I'm having for lunch and post a picture of a burrito
I am about to eat from Chipotle. I think
that is unnecessary and find it annoying when people do that. I don't even complain about a bad day that I
am having. My status on Facebook is
usually an announcement about something important going on in my life. For instance, there is an event that I am
going to called Life In Color in
Lawrence and I created an event and invited my friends about it just in case
they wanted to come along.
As
a society we give too much information on the Internet, Google and Facebook
even ask for a phone number to associate with your account. They claim it is for an extra layer of security,
but I think an email address is efficient enough. Even though I was reluctant to give mine to
Facebook I still did, with the logic that if my friends wanted to contact me
they can look me up by my phone number.
But I personally know all the friends I have on Facebook, unlike some
people who think it's a contest of how many Facebook friends they have and they
only have meet 5 or 6 in reality. There
are alternatives to added security, the best method that I noticed and really
liked is one used by BioWare's MMORPG Star
Wars - The Old Republic. This layer
of security is optional to the player but very affective if you choose to use it: when logging on, the game asks for a
username, password, and the optional layer security is a place to enter a security
key (See Figure 1.1). This isn't a
predetermined security key, it is generated on the fly from an iPhone app that
is associated with your account. When
you log on, you use the iPhone app to generate a random key, and then you enter
the generated key on the log on screen.
If the security keys match you are granted access to your account, if
not then your account locks. An email is
sent to your email address notifying you that someone tried to tamper with your
account and includes instructions on how to unlock your account. This would be a good layer of security for online
banks, online stores, and any other business transacting money. Ecommerce could learn something from computer
games, good job BioWare.
Figure 1.1
Click to enlarge image.
Figure 1.1
Click to enlarge image.
Being
anonymous adds a layer of security to the user, and other than a web site
asking a few questions to verify the user's identity I think the user should be
anonymous. Otherwise some layers of
security won't work, like BioWare's security key. I was online the other day surfing Youtube
and saw an advertisement for Pizza Hut. The
odd thing was I was about to open another browser tab to order pizza online. How did Google Adsense even know that I was
hungry for pizza? Did Google Adsense know
that I order pizza online about once per month and it's been almost a month
since I've ordered? I found that weird
and disturbing. Sure enough the
advertisement convinced me to order from Pizza Hut and not Papa John's like I
usually do. This fact makes me wonder if
Google is keeping tabs on my spending habits and have already created a psychological
profile of me. This makes me wonder if we
have any privacy left on the Internet.
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