Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Hymen renamed
- A Day in the Internet
- It will never be safe enough for that
- A breef resent histry of Teh Cowalish Co-uh Librul Partay
- Invisible Identities, Part 2: The Default Human
- Google gets real-time, but is real actually good?
– Read this before you just accept Facebook’s new privacy recommendations
– “The myths surrounding the hymen were created to control women’s freedom and sexuality. The only way to counteract this is by disseminating knowledge.”
– “Some useful comparisons for teaching about teh Interwebs …”
– “It always surprises me how often those who are most likely to condemn the quality of legal system are also those who want to give it the power to execute people. “We can be 100% sure if there’s DNA evidence”, they suggest.”
– Instant classic.
– “So erasing difference just reinforces racism, where we could be acknowledging difference as present and right and ours. The default human idea doesn’t work because none of us are. And it tries to make most people not exist.”
– “Naturally, for people who still haven’t thought through their privacy in terms of Twitter or Facebook should really think about it now; do you want your status updates appearing at the top of Google’s search results? A question especially important when Google’s CEO is happy to state on the record: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.””
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The post links to the category page for the EFF blog, not straight to the article permalink.
And even once you do read it, absorb it and recheck your settings, you’re still stuck with the new “public information”, name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, the pages that you are a “fan” of, and your entire friends list. Hiding that, even from people who aren’t even logged in is no longer an option. (Paul Fenwick also writes that it seems to be impossible to stop event RSVPs and the like popping up on your Wall for at least a moment, too.)
I am not sure, personally, why I’m so annoyed by this. Twitter, for example, has never had the option of keeping my following/followed by lists private and I choose to make my stream public there too. It’s possible to ascertain my current city, gender, current university and so on from that too (although I am thinking of trying to script something that takes down tweets from more than, say, 3 months ago). I guess it’s two things (1) taking away privacy options that used to be there and that people may have therefore assumed when creating some of their content and (2) that Facebook encourages other users to reveal information about me, eg photographs of me and the like, and while I can choose my self-presentation, it all gets harder when my friends are encouraged to actively add to the portrait of me.
Thanks for the headsup on my linkfail, Mary. Will fix it ASAP.