Facebook is an awesome service to find old friends, find new friends with the same interests, exchange visual info (sharing your baby's picture with your family) etc.
Being able to sync devices across is awesome. But try that outside Google/Apple and you're against a wall. Of course it can be done, but not for all applications etc.
Thing is that today's technology offers one hell of an options compared to ten years ago. But more than half of those comes with sharing your real data. Not just out of cunning CEO's or the NSA but out of pure functionality: If you don't use your real name in Twitter/Facebook how are other people suppose to find you?
Try keeping contact with friends via email. It's impossible, especially for the tech-unsavvy, while with facebook everything comes easy.
I would like to erase some of my online past, but it's not important. Not that much. What matters to me is:
* Remove all LEGAL powers for someone to harvest, sell, explore your data without me explicitly knowing about it.
* Prevent and heavily punish data abuse.
* Know the system[1]
[1] If you know how a system works (the internet, surveillance, etc) you can circumvent it, anytime. Tor will not help you if you use it to login into facebook. I mean, your enemy will know instantly that you're using TOR, your exit node etc. Being anonymous online, even without someone tailing you it's very hard but it can be done.
The problem with true online anonymity, is that it's not a one-time thing. It's a policy that needs you to be strict. No more forums, new fake emails all the time, registrations, etc. All of us can do that, but are we willing to do so??? I'm not.
We can't turn the clock back in time and undo what we did (except maybe if we are able to travel at light-speed... but that's not the point I guess). We have to focus on how to make governments and companies much more accountable about what they are doing. Many laws need extra elasticity (copyright) while others need to get much tougher (abuse of power by any authority).
Also some advancements at protocol level like user-predefine packet (path) routing, DNS and internet decentralization (away from USA), would not be a bad start.
I'm not advocating disappearing altogether. There's nothing wrong with keeping in touch with my friends on facebook, sharing the odd picture.
I do disagree that it feels good to use my real name. I wish I'd been more careful peppering my various accounts with references to my real name. I'd really love to be able to press a button and have zero results come up on google for my name.
Why on earth should you, random internet stranger, be a few clicks away from finding photos of my baby son on facebook? Who gave you the authority to know so much about me? Well, I did by sharing it in the first place.
Not that I have anything in particular to hide, but I feel very strongly that it should be me who's in control of that data.
I don't think it can be wholly solved by technology or by laws.
I think it can only be solved by behavioural changes in the way we use the web.
I perhaps have slightly more fringe interests than you, and in the past have been somewhat indiscreet, albeit on obscure forums.
But in general, if I have an opinion about something, I'm going to publicly and proudly state it - even if I later have to recant. I'd rather admit publicly that I was wrong than hide my views.
I personally felt like the Internet gave us the power of managing several identities, having personas tied to some communities, making it simple to meet new people and yet (sort of) protect our privacy.
Now, I feel like the game has changed and if you want to enjoy anything online, more and more, you'll have to allow access to your life to everyone you ever interact with, unless you spend a lot of time tweaking privacy settings everywhere and live almost like a criminal on the run.
All the cloud sync stuff is nice, but not that nice. I would much, much rather have to run my own server for backing things up, or just backup locally to different devices, than be in the mess we're in now. We've given up far too much for what amounts, at the end of the day, to convenience.
As for facebook, I'd personally return to the world before it existed in a heartbeat, given the choice.
Google in particular has its digital fingerprints all over the web. For example, you visit a site with Google fonts and Google records your IP address, then you go to a site that serves the jQuery library from Google's servers, Google records your IP address again. You visit a site with Google Analytics - another log. Then you sign into GMail. Does Google join up all these actions? We don't really know because Google's vaguely-worded privacy policies don't tell you anything.
This is a company that "designs with data" and has an insatiable appetite to track and record as much online behaviour as it possibly can. They now have an entire OS that could potentially track your every action - even when you print to your desktop printer (because you can't do anything in the OS without being signed into your Google account).
Of course, a lot of people don't find this a problem (including people in the tech community). But many other people simply aren't aware of just how easily their online behaviour can be tracked and recorded.
Google are not evil, but no company, be it Google or Facebook, should be able to track and record such vast quantities of online behaviour without closer and more critical scrutiny. But that scrutiny simply isn't happening, particularly from the tech community who give Google an easy ride on such matters.
Why do they get let off?
http://pando.com/2013/12/16/googles-for-profit-surveillance-...
I have an separated and heavy encrypted off-line network for the stuff I really want to keep secret. That won't change ever because seperating data became a part of my life and I can live with that pretty good.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932327
The fact that most of my professional life was very publicly exposed online has now gotten in the way of me being able to land a job. Not because there's anything bad in there. Quite to the contrary. The issue is that you can't dumb-down or narrow your resume when a simple Google search reveals you are far more than the resume says.
Some people are scared (is he after my job?) others are protective (he just wants to get inside to learn the business and then become a competitor) and others think you are over qualified (he's going to get bored and leave in x months).
Short of legally changing your name there's no way to disconnect from your online fingerprint.
At fifty years of age I am in a situation where, after hundreds of resumes over three years I have come to the conclusion I am not employable. It seems my only path will have to be through entrepreneurship. Read my post for details.
You say in the other thread that your wife suggested a Bachelor's/Masters but what about MBA or PhD instead? I know of folks who've come into Systems PhDs with diverse backgrounds. I'm sure MBA programs might also look favourably on your experience (though that route probably costs more).
In general terms, it is disappointing that there seem to be no reputable programs that recognize the value of people's life experience. I've shared some of my code with CS department heads in the process of exploring various options for admissions. A couple came back with praise for the range of work I had done and even went as far as saying they didn't understand half of it. Regrettably that was not enough to work out any deals.
The other aspect of engineering education I despise is the need for credits in non-engineering areas. I'm sorry, I'm fifty years old, I have almost no interest in taking a course in sociology, history, geography or English literature. My self-education was not limited to the technical domain. I've read most of the classics, dozens of business and marketing books and have had skin in the game at all levels for years. I can see asking a 19 year old to take an English composition class as part of the path towards an EE or CS degree. I can't see it as even remotely relevant for people at different stations in life. Just a pet peeve of mine.
When I was 16, I was 'paranoid' about computer security. I used gpg, would never dream of giving my real name to any website. I distrusted every website.
Now I'm 31, and you can easily find 5 years of reddit comment history linked to my almost unique real name. Facebook has algorithms that can link my face to my real identity. I carry a location tracking device and microphone in my pocket. I sit in front of a camera all day. Google has all my search history. My ISP knows which sites I visit.
It's just incredible how comfortable I became with sharing this data about myself online. I don't know how it happened. My 16 year old self imagined that I'd have had some awesome technological setup that made me immune to tracking. But the truth is I just got used to the possibility of being tracked, and then forgot about it altogether.
But these NSA revelations have woken me up and I'm now back in that paranoid state and actively seeking ways of protecting myself.
I think many people have had the same experience.
For all the talk about the generations of the future being tracked and recorded from birth, I have to wonder if we're the dinosaurs and our kids will be saying:
"Shit Dad, why did you share all this stuff about yourself, are you stupid or something?"