Myspace: Where are you going? We still have all your HUMILIATING PICS Remember those regrettable party photos you snapped during spring-break in 2005? Myspace does. And the once-massive social network isn't above waving them about if it means getting you to come back and check out its redesigned music portal. The company has recently been sending users an email message (as first reported by …
I once had a Myspace account. It has been deleted long time ago. I did try once to re-lunch my Myspace account. It failed and it got deleted again.
It is going to stay that way. I don't plan to return to Myspace any time soon. I also expect a lot of accounts to be deleted in next few days and weeks with this email campaign taking place.
While I can take the photos down off my own site, archive.org still has an archive of the previous version.
Attempting to just change the text on the page actually makes it rank higher in Google as it counts it as a "new" page, had to use their page removal tools.
I recently had to remove an entire archive due to not wanting to get complaints for an old site I do not update any more. The original event warned people they would be photographed and the photos would be put online.
While I can take the photos down off my own site, archive.org still has an archive of the previous version.
Well that's easily remedied: https://archive.org/about/exclude.php
And they will exclude content retroactively, which is sometimes a real shame. A number of old sites I used to frequent in the late 90s/early 2000s got their domain names bought by aggregators/resellers who now exclude the archive.org crawler. As a result, the original content is lost to the ages.
Every social network site (actually any site carrying personal info profiles) should be obliged to provide a no-fuss, one-click profile deletion for those that want it - a 'right to be forgotten' for site data - that wipes out all trace of you; photos, contacts, teenagea angst the lot. If you're considered adult enough to put the stuff up, it should be accepted, contrary to facebooks take, that you're adult enough to decide you really want to shred it permanently at a time of your choosing.
The 'in case you change your mind we'll hang on to it' twaddle should be done away with for the thinly veiled commercial self-interest it really is; good for nothing more than, in myspace's case, a little mild blackmail. Embarassing teenage behaviour shouldn't be something that haunts the rest of your life merely on the offchance someone can make money out of it.
Every social network site (actually any site carrying personal info profiles) should be obliged to provide a no-fuss, one-click profile deletion for those that want it - a 'right to be forgotten' for site data - that wipes out all trace of you; photos, contacts, teenagea angst the lot.
It may be educational to read the T&Cs of setups like FB and Google. It'll frighten you.
I agree with you, personally I would also like to see an auto-delete for unused accounts. That way, if you don't visit it anymore you don't have to mine for whatever password you used (and you may not even have the email address anymore).. If you haven't visited a site for a year, that's a lifetime in Internet years and they should zap the data after giving you a month's notice on whatever contact addresses you left.
Just an idea.
Or perhaps you should have the COMMON SENSE not to put things you don't or might not want others to see in plain view of the WHOLE WORLD. The whole "social media" nonsense is, and always will be a time-bomb for anyone who might give a damn about what others think of them! Coupled with the fact that it exposes the worst sort of egotism and self-importance...... you guessed it - I'm not a fan!
Or perhaps you should have the COMMON SENSE...
"If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" much? The thing is, you do not know today what might come back and bite you tomorrow. Sure, not sharing anything gets around that (works fine for me) but it sort of throws out the baby with the bathwater, you know...
Is it possible to stop others from posting pictures of you on the internet? I really don't see how... unless you just don't do anything at all that you wouldn't want the WHOLE WORLD to see or know about. That probably would make for a boring use of the time of your life.
What somewhat creeps me out is that I have taken pictures of friends with my "smart phone" and it prompts me with questions like, "Is this John Smith?" Well, no. But the person does slightly resemble "John Smith" which is odd, because "John Smith" is not on social media at all. The only way I could conceive of my phone knowing what "John Smith" looks like is because of the photo I have set up on "John Smith's" contact information. This sort of facial recognition stuff is neat, but I sometimes wonder what would happen if it mined key parts of the web to find all images of someone.*
* This may already exist and have a friendly Windows XP (or iOS) interface on the web for people to use. I'm trying to withdraw from much of this intrusive tech, so I'm unaware of such things these days.
"Is it possible to stop others from posting pictures of you on the internet?"
Not impossible...but I make it very difficult by not allowing anyone to take my picture...with my knowledge, of course. But then again, I rarely associate with the narcissistic types who would use any of these asinine social networking sites in the first place.
What somewhat creeps me out is that I have taken pictures of friends with my "smart phone" and it prompts me with questions like, "Is this John Smith?" Well, no. But the person does slightly resemble "John Smith" which is odd, because "John Smith" is not on social media at all.
They don't need to be online. If you use Google Picasa or Apple's iPhoto there is already a database of facial data, and it only takes one of their friends to tag them and that's their privacy gone .. unless you take the trouble of tagging images of him as someone else too.
The only way to beat tagging images is to poison the well. Use other people's names, celebrity names, politicians promoting surveillance - the best way to deal with facial recognition is to add confusion. You cannot prevent it from happening, unfortunately, but you sure as hell can throw a few spanners in the works. We should organise a national tagging day where we tag as many images we find of people we know with the wrong names, just because we can.
/soapbox
"Or perhaps you should have the COMMON SENSE not to put things you don't or might not want others to see in plain view of the WHOLE WORLD....." Well, what you think is good to display one day you may change your mind about later. We had a great laugh when we discovered one of our very serious and always well-dressed auditors used to be a Greenpeace hippy in her uni days. An article with one great pic of her (still on the Web), showing her with green mohican and suitably gender-disguising dungarees, includes a great quote on the 'evils' of deodorant! Needless to say, she was not too amused to see what she once considered 'righteousness' emailed around her department!
This can help too ...
https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch
I do wish there was some magic internet eraser to erase some "blunders" from my online past.... But we have to be realistic - this is a pandora's box that once opened really can't be closed.
Because once information is out there it is in the "public domain" and you've got to live with it...
Sure you want a right to delete your account but that won't delete any reposts or archives...so your drunken exploits, embarrassing political statements and steamy sex tapes are likely to be there to stay....
Besides editing the past is a dangerously double edged sword - it may save some people from "personal embarrassment" but it will also allow perverts, extremists and other scum to hide their game and continue harming people... so where do you draw the line?
Would you want an aspiring politician to be able to edit his past and censor out the inflammatory hate filled pamphlets he wrote when a member of a neo-nazi group during his student days?
Would you accept that this "youthful mistake" should be edited out or should it remain public and be faced squarely? (up to the politician to convince us it was a youthful mistake!).
I think we are entitled to make mistakes, and not just when we're young - that's part and parcel of being a human being. However, the mistakes we make when we're young should be protected - this whole 13 year limit is rubbish IMHO.
If becoming globally known is destructive for adults, how do you expect a child to cope with that? Honestly? That's just a different kind of child abuse for profit, even more reprehensible than the whole pester power idea.
What we need to do - as a society - is to accept that people change. Youthful indiscretions are just that. Where we are now is the worst case where almost everything is known (or can be discovered) and is dragged out as soon as someone want to pillory you in the court of whatever passes for today's politically correct public opinion. Smoking a joint or dressing up as Hitler do not mean you are a junkie or a racist. Any system which allows deletion of all copies of a picture of you in drag at a fancy dress party (or a school play) would be abused by people with real things to hide.
"Besides editing the past is a dangerously double edged sword - it may save some people from "personal embarrassment" but it will also allow perverts, extremists and other scum to hide their game and continue harming people... so where do you draw the line?"
We are at war with Eastasia, and have ALWAYS been at war with them...
Big Brother is watching you.
What is the problem with a photo of some stoned/drunk teen throwing up on a beach ... if you have not personally experienced that then you have not lived iow you wasted your teen years. If the guy on the pic was older than that it only means he knows how to party, so should have good team-building skills.
Not Anon because I love downvotes from puritans, posh-wannabees, and hypocrites ;-)
Because the recruiters and employers take a look at this crap these days and go "Oh what a terrible yob, we can't have anyone like that working here...Next". Then they head off out from the office at 5:30 on a Friday, getting completely shit faced and pucking over some random stranger whose underwear they have their hand firmly inside.
"Because the recruiters and employers take a look at this crap these days and"
But do you *want* to work for a company whose HR department is staffed by people like that? Getting employed should be as much about you picking the company as them picking you, and if you can filter out all the Catberts simply by photoshopping an interesting childhood onto FarcePuke then that sounds like a bloody good idea.
Yes, kids should be made aware that employers use Google, but unless those employers want to cut themselves off from 95% of the workforce, they'll have to get used to the fact that their staff have a private life and a history outside work.
> But do you *want* to work for a company whose HR department is staffed by people like that?
Ken, it's all about building your own image and marketing yourself and all that. For better or worse, people have now been empowered to do that and extend the reach of their "brand" beyond their immediate community (village-dwellers will know what I mean). It is a two-edged sword though, and one that not everyone knows how to use effectively yet.
That day will probably come, along with the day when one will be able to be "forgotten" by the web (when the generation from 1990 get to the age when they become eligible for high office, and see their Prime Ministerial ambitions quenched by some indiscreet pictures from a long forgotten website under the myspace.com domain name, for example).
Sorry for talking like a PR bod, which I'm most definitely not, but that's my humble analysis of the situation.
As far as I am concerned these social netfarting sites can keep all the erroneous data that they have already collected. It's their diskspace that's redundant after all. The more garbage they collect, the more the good old t'tinternet will become a huge dustbin full of the worlds digital rubbish, mainly comprising, homemade music of questionable quality, photos of cats and countless images of human reproductive organs, all linked to dead eMail accounts which SPAM Bots deluge incessantly with messages advertising more places to dump to or download digital shite from.
My own MYSpace account bacame a conveyor of fast flux malware, a friend lost money from their bank account somehow via the site and I was locked out of the account, unable to contact a real person to do anything about the situation. I wonder how many other abandoned MySpace accounts are in the same state ?
ALF
We've all done smart stuff and stupid stuff. Why hide the past, its what makes us who we are today. No amount of editing will change who you are. Live with it, celebrate it, and learn from it.
For myself, I never used MySpace and I kind of regret not having that window to the younger me
"I kind of regret not having that window to the younger me"
I have boxes full of things called photographs, taken with a variety of SLR and single-use cameras, and printed out (at considerable expense at the time) by the likes of Boots, Photo-Express, Max Spielmann, et al. Thankfully the only one ever searching them will be me, and perhaps my family after I'm gone!
"Peak Facebook" in any given country is supposedly no more than about 50 percent of the population as 'active' users, and since 'active' has such a spectacularly low bar, 'genuinely enthusiastic' has to be far less. Yet with less than half the population engaged, the idea that everyone is using it grows up, principally driven by the media for their own ends, in turn putting pressure on the hold outs to get with the program.
But once the dust settles and the peak has been reached, the social pressure dissipates pretty quickly; the hold outs know that the worst is over and even casual users start to drop it. For the genuinely enthusiastic, the boot's then on the other foot and they in turn have to spend some 'facebook time' communicating in other ways.
The danger for facebook is that a slide turns into a rout as it did with myspace and bebo. Friends reunited suffered a spectacular demise, but settled down to occupy a useful niche that will inevitably be popular with some people, some of the time. Hard to admit it, but Facebook does have something useful in its core function to fall back on beyond the reality distortion bubble, but I suspect far greater expectations from investors and advertisers - who really do 'need' what it offers - will lead to a push for desperate action that will exacerbate any rout that develops with the "she'll no take it cap'n" school of business strategy.
FBs revenues may have gone up, but it's notable that it's principally mobile driving it, and that looks likely to be a poisoned chalice. Thanks partly to the NSA, the growing privacy movement isn't going away, even if it is going to be a slow burner (so was the 'quit India' movement). Either the law will be pressured to restrict snooping, or users - particularly those affluent educated ones beloved of admongers - will take their own steps. Either will hurt facebook worse than most, and the simple fact of ad saturation will reduce per impression revenues further. It's a bit like aviations 'coffin corner', and I don't really see how facebook can avoid being victims of their own success.
Unlike search, social networks rely less on their 'big idea' than they do on a bit of P T Barnum style- showmanship crossed with a generous helping of social tyranny to get them to the top, but once they arrive, only the big idea can retain their position, and facebooks isn't up to snuff. Companies this large don't vanish overnight, but I suspect facebooks future looks a lot less like Google than it does like the 'dead man walking' that yahoo is today.
"Peak Facebook" ???
Wow, wow wow wow, slow down. Oh .. my .. God ..
Please don't tell me that Robo thing (NSFW) also has a "sharing" option..
:)
They could breathe new life into the site if they went the Spotify route and let people stream music from their site, build playlists, let people exchange. I don't have much hope for that. Toward the end, it was the wild west, not much better than 4chan. There's a fix, they should probably wipe everyone's account and welcome the people back rather than use blackmail.
this will happen with FB too, when the plebes get bored. And the next "big social network" after that..
your data will be theirs to use against you as they see fit. No matter how "permanent" you believe your Current Important Thing really is - it will not last forever, or even very long at all.
Government agencies all abuzz about Cloud services should really think twice about handing over critical client/public data to companies that have been in existence for much less time than that Agency has existed continuously. Remember all the IT juggernauts of the 2Ks that are already forgotten? They were prime, unbreakable, solid as granite. And now their buildings are leased to arcade/pizza places for kids and to fly-by-night importers of grey market Chinese knockoffs.
Ten years, 20 years...very few companies in the computer/information processing services have lasted that long. Many government agencies have run unbroken for nearly a century.
What do you do when your social media tanks with your data? What do you do when your Cloud Service tanks with two decades of your client/citizen data?
One of the real problems with modern politics in the age of instant media is that it is all about 'now' and what the media think, not about sound decision making. I'm pretty sure that in the UK at least, apart from the supposed cost savings of 'ID by facebook', a good deal of government getting into bed with high profile social media and cloud services is largely about looking in touch and 'down wiv da kidz' on the front pages. Government largely doesn't get IT as a whole, so perversely it has even more need to look like it does lest any searching questions be asked. After a bit of pre-emptive box ticking, the media's goldfish-like attention span does the rest, so they 'move on' to something else.
The select committees usually pull the real train wrecks apart very publicly, but it's invariably long after the damage is done, and has little real sanction in any case other than being shouty.
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