Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Before my list, some questions:
Do you still want to see my list of 11 things most people don’t know about me? Read it all
I just thought I’d tell you.
Something is amiss.
Google isn’t coming up. Neither is Facebook. Nor Twitter.
I haven’t looked at the news yet, so I don’t know if this is widespread.
Or ominous.
Pity all the addicts of such services.
Are the Facebook posts and Twitter tweets you make while away from the job immune from the prying eyes of your employer? The New York Times reports that new software called Social Sentry is ensuring everything you do online is being scrutinized.
Employers pay between $2 and $8 per employee depending on company size to have Social Sentry’s proprietary software automatically track employees in the social media sphere. The Social Sentry service is only available for Facebook and Twitter at this point, but it will soon expand to cover YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn.
Six out of 10 companies now say they have a social media monitoring policy. Employers are considering anything that’s publicly accessible as something that you waive your right to privacy on.
Source: Clark Howard: Employers monitor your social networking profile
OK, I know. I’m spitting in the cyber wind again.
But I refuse to accept the premise that privacy no longer matters.
Or even that privacy is more public than it used to be.
Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.
Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.
[…]
In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.
You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.
[…]
His advice: “When you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.”
Source: New York Times
You really should read the parts I left out.
Emily Belz wrote over at WorldMagBlog:
Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from politics and go walk around outside, look at the trees, listen to the sounds around you, gaze at the sky – perhaps catch the International Space Station flying overhead?
A new service on Twitter called Twisst alerts you when the space station will be flying over you. (To our Twitter skeptics out there, I’m trying to win you over!) It uses the location you enter on your Twitter profile, then calculates when you might see a flyover and sends you a notice on your account.
Maybe I’ll update this later with a screenshot of where ISS is relative to me.
(Oh, hey! This post adds much-needed alternative rendering of “It all depends on what the meaning of ISS is”!)
Look, I’m no gullible neophyte, OK? Maybe what I’m linking to is a set of shams.
But the idea of using Twitter this way is fascinating to me.
That was allegedly taken in Iran. (Click for larger image.)
And here are links to two Twitter-ers claiming to be in Iran: Change_for_Iran and persiankiwi.
May the Lord keep His people. And use them as lights in the night.
HT: WorldMagBlog
Late this morning, our youngest-but-already-fifteen son Andrew and I went on a one-hour hike. Just here on our home place.
If you follow me on Twitter, then you already read this:
| Sitting in sun on tree root by tiny babbling waterfall in little creek in back 40. Peaceful! |
I posted that to Twitter from my cellphone at 10:52 this morning. (For a practically-fifty-year-old, that’s pretty amazing stuff even yet!)
Anyway, this is where I was when I Twittered that:
Sitting there in the warm sunshine listening to the babbling waterfall was therapeutic, relaxing, and conducive to thinking thoughts.
Then I looked to my right and my thoughts became less meditative and more contemplative. “If he becomes territorial and aggressive, how long will this little creek delay him?”
After eyeballing me a couple of times, he ignored me in favor of keeping his attention focused on the grass.
So I turned my attention upward:
Then zoomed in on the left-most branches:
A very nice place to be. Oh, hey, I just remembered I have an aerial shot:
The tree I sat under is in the tree line to the right of the five-sided field at the right edge of the photo. 🙂