I think this is a very interesting clip… I agree with him, a lot of the proposals put forward were either created by, or supported by Republicans until it became unpopular to support them… Granted, I don’t think the Dems are compromising as much as they could, but at least they are compromising some.

“There can be no freedom without both security and justice, I believe that … Europe’s policies have too often focused only on security and neglected justice.” – Viviane Reding, Justice Comissioner-designate for the EU.

This is a terrific quote. I think all too often, the west (not just Europe) has taken the stance of focusing on security, and ousting rights. In the US, the Patriot Act is a prime example of that. Even now, Obama is considering lifting the prohibitions of profiling to further secure our air traffic.

When will people realize that there is an inherent risk in everything we do? Why should we give up our freedoms, our protections, etc for further “security”? What is our freedom worth if we are profiled in air ports based on race, religion, gender, or any other number of factors which are currently prohibited?

I hope that Obama refuses to take this route.

“But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and think, what would we do if we were starting the company now, and starting the site now, and we decided that these would be the social norms now, and we just went for it,” Mark Zuckerberg, The Crunchies Awards.

With these words, Zuckerberg officially declared war on my Privacy.

Let me start from the beginning. I have had a long and intimate relationship with Facebook. I was one of the individuals who petitioned to add Kettering University  (where I then went to school) to their network of universities. I was a huge proponent from the beginning, recruiting many of the friends that I have on there today. It was a beacon of light coming out of the chaos that was myspace. The simplicity and ease of sharing information and connecting with people blew my mind.

I watched Facebook grow, supported it when it opened up to people outside of university networks. I saw it through several user interface design changes, including the (at the time) unpopular newsfeed. I thought it was an ok idea. I was a bit reserved, but got used to it.

All of this was the process of building a great service. Zuckerberg was a born entrepreneur, he knew how to start a business. What I later found out was that he couldn’t get out of the start-up mode and into maintaining a great business.

At one point, Facebook implemented very strict privacy controls, so that users could control who could, and could not see their data. In fact, you could control whether or not anyone could see your profile.  I took full advantage of this, for purely selfish reasons, but reasons none the less.

The decision was primarily fueled by the fact that many of my mom’s students were getting on Facebook and trying to friend me. I was not particularly interested in her having to explain grown-up things to her schoolchildren.

So, I was quite content. For about a year or two, Facebook was perfect. In my eyes, of course. Then, the start of my woes started cropping up. I started learning that Facebook was selling my information to companies, with my “consent”. Warning bells started going off in my head, but when Facebook backed off and implemented new privacy policy, I calmed down.

Then the user interface started degrading. They made me have to look at two pages to get things off of the news feed. This was generally annoying, but not enough to drive me off the platform.

However, recently, Facebook radically changed its privacy settings. It theoretically allowed you to keep your old settings, so I decided to give it ago. However, that was when the friend requests started flooding in. I was miffed, I told Facebook to keep my old settings, how did I start getting friend requests? That should have been impossible.

Then I started combing through the Privacy settings… They abolished the ability to hide your profile or control who sends you friend requests. Technically, you can hide yourself from search results, but if you have any mutual friends, someone can easily find you. This torqued me off.

To make matters worse, I discovered that unless you directly edit the settings, your friends can use most of your information in any of their applications or websites. This effectively allows your information to be shared with companies and groups which you have no affiliation with.

This put Facebook and me in an extremely uncomfortable position. However, it was not until reading Zuckerberg’s words that I finally snapped. He had decided that sharing information publicly was the new social norm. Taking away my ability to keep information to myself was all part of their grand plan to redefine privacy standards.

It showed me that Facebook has absolutely no intention of respecting my privacy. I would venture to say that in the future (a claim they would surely refute), Facebook will continue slowly degrading its privacy settings until virtually all information is public.

Now, many people will say I am over-reacting, just as I did when people were angry about things in the past. That’s fine, perhaps I am. But with most online services, I don’t have the expectation of privacy. In fact, I expect them to be scoundrels who will use my information for barely legal purposes. I tailor my information to that expectation.

With Facebook, especially while they had strong privacy settings, I grew to expect privacy. I expected that my information would stay private according to the settings which I defined. In fact, that if I so chose, I would not be findable, let alone friendable. They betrayed my trust. That, friends, is what sent me over the edge.

So, as of this evening, I have either removed, or restricted almost all of my Facebook profile. I will continue to allow Twitter to show my status, and I will allow Facebook to import my blog posts. I will also continue interacting on Facebook. But, you can expect that I will be decreasing my interaction with Facebook, and will not put any more information on there.

If you would like to keep up with what’s going on in my life, you can view my blog posts, if they are longer than what will import into Facebook, select “view original post”. I will be posting contact information on my blog in the form of a restricted page. If you want access to it, register, and I will approve you (if I know who you are).

Be careful with what information you share.

- Joel

Mentioned in this post:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/69081.html

http://words.timsworlds.com/2010/01/11/facebook-declares-open-war-on-privacy/

Over the past ten years, I’ve been on both sides of the aisle politically. Originally, I was a conservative Republican in both fiscal and social issues. When I went to college, all that changed. I began to become more and more liberal on social issues. Fiscally, I was never quite comfortable with being liberal, but I decided better to be with the liberals than the party who would see a constitutional amendment barring me from marrying. Its only natural that social issues would dominate my political views. In college, they often do.

I proudly supported Obama from long before he announced his candidacy, and made my first political donations of any kind to his campaign. And while not always agreeing with his positions, or his actions, I’ve generally agreed with how he’s handled himself in office.

However, this general favor does not extend itself to the Democratic Party right now. I have just witnessed a genuine attempt by a Democratic Senator, Max Baucus, to come up with a truly bipartisan bill be targeted by both the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats don’t like that there is no public option, and despite the deep concessions made, the Republicans have decided that its better politics to oppose the effort all together.

This disappoints me greatly. I don’t care if there is a public option in the bill or not. And I firmly believe that the Republicans do not have the best interests of the nation in mind, they only have the 2010 elections in mind.

There is still time for the Democrats and Republicans to disprove the growing feeling that both sides are being stubborn and playing the same partisan politics that most of them campaigned against last year. However, if our Health Care solution is not a bi-partisan solution, I will have lost faith in both parties.

I wonder when a major party will endorse ideals such as the following:

- Our government must be fiscally responsible. We must eliminate our deficit, and work to get out of debt. We help do this by eliminating the billions spent on pork-barrel spending coming from both sides of the aisle, spend our money pro-actively to prevent future problems rather than only spending to fix existing ones, and eliminate the billions of government waste by all branches of the government.

- Our government should not turn religious beliefs into law. Seriously, come on, the sanctity of marriage was destroyed by the generations of divorce, abuse, and adultery. There is no reason why gays shouldn’t be able to contribute to the statistics

- Education should be our greatest social push. Teachers make up the fundamental tenets of our society. We must support their efforts with every ounce in us. Education is the best way to remain competitive world-wide, and produce subsequent generations of men and women who are hard-working, creative, and honest.

- We must not abandon our capitalistic heritage. However, we must place more safeguards around companies so that no single company can grow large enough to bring the entire country down with it. Responsibility is a central tenet of capitalism, and there must be a better way to ensure that people take responsibility for their actions before things blow up. If a company fails, it should be allowed to fail. However it should not have been allowed to grow too large to begin with.

- Personal responsibility should be the message delivered in every government aid program. Welfare must be about getting people off of welfare and leading productive lives. International aid must be about helping people survive while preventing the conflict that created the need. Individuals entering debt must prove that they have the means to pay for it.

- Health care must be about preventative care. Leading healthy lives is vital to bringing down healthcare costs, regardless of how the reform situation plays out.

- Foreign policy must be about mutual respect and treating the rest of the world as equals rather than bullying our way through negotiations. It should not be about appeasing governments who have no interest in making concessions of their own.

- We must be good stewards of our environment. It is our mandate to ensure a healthy ecosystem for our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. This is about taking responsibility for what we have done to the world around us.

- The lobbying industry, as well as political donations by corporations must be eliminated. Congress should be in the business of listening to the people, not businesses who have no interest but padding their bottom line.

- Finally, bills and laws should be about enabling society to pursue these goals. It should not be about achieving them by spending more and getting ourselves in more debt. Enable private non-profit groups to deploy many of these programs. Require matching private funds for any government funds, and ensure that there are checks and balances in place to prevent abuse.

I may not be a politician, but it looks to me like those who are have lost sight of the American ideals of personal responsibility, respecting the lives of those around us, and working pro-actively to create a better world for our descendants.