Nowhere to hide: I want Myspace and privacy back

Mr. Jordon says:

05:33am | 17/01/13

Don’t sign up in the first place and you don’t have a problem. It works for my wife.

Jim Moriarty says:

07:07am | 17/01/13

Aw, man, I had a LiveJournal! Even had a paid account. Ahh, remember Harry Potter and LOTR fandoms way back when? So much funny drama.

Everyone’s pretty much abandoned it for tumblr now.

Anon delivers says:

07:30am | 17/01/13

Pwned again ! How many times is that now ? Their users must have Stockholm Syndrome.

Matthais says:

07:34am | 17/01/13

A rather pointless and internally contradictory article.

Word to the unwise, no “patch of online grass” was ever or will ever be your own.

If you’d like your own “patch”, buy a $200 NAS device from your local electronics store and switch on the web services. That way, you can have your own little website in your house where nobody else can see it.

It astounds me that anyone would even consider sharing a “live journal” of their life online, such narcissism…

What saddens me is that articles like this are even drafted, let alone published. If you want to share something with a friend, call them, have a coffee or a beer with them.

dancan says:

08:01am | 17/01/13

You want to keep your information away from net stalkers, get off the internet.  You want to vent to your friends, see them in person.  You want privacy, go for a walk in the bush.  You want a ‘live’ journal, buy a diary.

It’s that simple people.

SimpleSimon says:

08:11am | 17/01/13

This post makes absolutely no sense. Momentarily disregarding the fact that Facebook was never “just for you”, this new feature does nothing to make your private posts public, or change the way you use the service. You even acknowledged that in your piece!

If you want a piece of the web that is truly yours, make your own site and lock it down. Don’t look to social media to find privacy, the very concept is silly.

subotic is anti-social says:

08:14am | 17/01/13

@Claire Porter, GO BLOG YOURSELF!

Tork says:

08:17am | 17/01/13

There are plenty of places that you can call your own.  Look a bit harder..

First thing that pops to mind is a blog.  I’ve got a dad blog.  They can be set to private.  It can be just like myspace without the need to know HTML like Myspace did.

Harquebus says:

08:40am | 17/01/13

Never use your real name on the internet.
torproject.org.

Jaqui says:

09:15am | 17/01/13

Free from Google, free from Facebook use gmx.com for email and ixquick.com for your search.

You would rather be safe than sorry right! See leaving Google and Facebook as an insurance policy.

stephen says:

09:38am | 17/01/13

Confcious says “when one puts junk data in, one obtains not enlightnment but useless inforamtion at the other end”.

Its a bit over done really.  Big deal that when you like a picture of a cute kitten you get spammed by pet ads.

Anniebello says:

10:39am | 17/01/13

Want your privacy?
Then don’t give it away to farcebook and twit-er in the first place.
How many times do people have to be told that once its on the net, its on the net forever?
Gees, not rocket science.

neil says:

10:56am | 17/01/13

I have toally avoided all social media until recently. I constantly come under pressure from friends to get a FB acct. A xmas card I received from the UK that had a subtle dig about FB made me at least investigate only to find that my personal email of 12 years that is hosted on my accountants server and uses their company domain already had a FB acct? which I could not access.

So I used the forgot password function and changed it to get access, this was not straight forward as the acct had been frozen when I tried to access it from an “unknown device”. The acct had been set up and accessed from Seattle Washington, it used my first name which is part of my email but a false surname and birthday, there was luckily no significant history on the acct as it hadn’t been used since it was setup in 2007.

When I tried to deactivate this bogus acct and set up a new one I found that FB will retain the history forever as under their terms they own it and my personal email address will remain permanently associated with that account so I can never use it on FB.

Needless to say I will never use FB.

beowulf says:

12:18pm | 17/01/13

I still use Livejournal. I generally update my blog about twice a month; I am not sure anybody reads it. I can see sites like Livejournal making a resurgence, because it does provide an element of privacy.

I go to Facebook almost every day, but I do not really use it. If I do use it I no longer tag anybody and just upload the odd photo, which I am never in.

Facebook still seems to have some use, but Twitter seems only for famous people to advertise their next gig.

Cry in my Gin says:

12:56pm | 17/01/13

Social networking is going to the pub on a Friday night and backstabbing people you know to their faces over a couple of beers and possibly a counter meal. All this other stuff is just ewank.

Bob the builder says:

03:19pm | 17/01/13

Claire the internet has made the world a village. Just like living in a village anything you say will be known by the whole village. Within 20 years we will be living like puritans in the 17th century terrified to say or do anything otherwise we will be condemned by the village.

We got what we wished for a village, a global village.

Meph says:

03:43pm | 17/01/13

Geocities was a wretched hive of scum and villainy. About all it was good for was stress testing the (then) latest web browsers for memory leaks, and your own constitution against epileptic seizures.

Michellemac says:

05:23pm | 17/01/13

I don’t get the problem. I have pretty high security settings on my facebook profile which means people will only be able to see what they could see before. I regularly (as in at least monthly, often more that that) google myself and my facebook profile to see what comes up (because of my job) and then alter as needed (I have only needed to do this once in 6 years, for a ‘minor’ security breach). Facebook recently made this even easier by having an option to ‘search profile as’ so I can see exactly what others can seeabout me as if I were them.

You can also choose to have messages from friends only, or friends of friends. I don’t see it as any different to face to face life…I talk about my friends and have often suggested matches etc amongst other friends and this is exactly that.

I still have not found a solution for looking up people with vaguely common names though…Facebook still throws up pages and pages of possible matches and there is no way to narrow the search down if there is no prior facebook relation or friends/likes in common.