Here’s a lovely video I shot from the front porch on a recent evening and forgot to share here. Hey, the colors were nice, OK? I sped it up just a bit, to add some whimsy.
It was a beautiful day today, so much so that I spent a solid hour doing yard work. And by yard work, I mean picking up and breaking branches. I have an impressive little tower growing in the backyard just now. The top half of it is what I did today.
All of this will go in the fire pit, eventually. If you look in the foreground you can see some thicker branches also waiting for that bit of ambience. Not pictures is a bunch of firewood. The first problem is that it has been, paradoxically, too cold to start a fire.
And now, suddenly, and briefly, it is not.
On the other hand, it is much too windy. But, eventually, we’ll get the right set of conditions. On that day, we’ll start by burning all of these leaves and light lawn litter that is in the fire pit.
It’s a rite of spring, or something. Now if spring would just hurry up and arrive. But, friends, it was a lovely and almost warm day today.
After my break in the yard this afternoon it was back inside and grading once again. Students were reading this piece, from my colleague, Dr. Angela Cirucci.
Facebook is forthcoming about what happens with our posts and the related meta-data (e.g., tags, locations, and sharing permissions) that we have intentionally provided (the chopped carrots). These are the data, as Mr. Zuckerberg notes above, that we can download. However, Facebook is much less forthcoming about the data they assume we have unintentionally provided (the fingerprints) and the data that Facebook itself derives from our contributions (the registry).
One of the main strategies that Facebook uses to side-step this topic is to focus only on notions of social privacy, rather than institutional privacy. While your social privacy includes which of your content other internet users are privy to, your institutional privacy has to do with what Facebook themselves can see, and what new content they ultimately derive.
In fact, Mr. Zuckerberg’s definition of privacy is an outdated notion of privacy that only includes social considerations. If, for instance, we set the permission, what Facebook calls the “audience,” of a post to “Only Me,” we expect that coworkers, family, and the public will not be able to view it. However, what about Mr. Zuckerberg himself? Or members of a Facebook research team? Or a new data analysis tool developed by Facebook? How would we ever know? Suddenly “Only Me” seems potentially misleading.
That’s from 2018 and Facebook has only gotten more concerning, I’m sorry to say.
This is a moment in that class, though, where students (most of whom are dismissive of Facebook as something that Boomers use) start to really consider the implications of all of our social media platforms. It’s an eye-opening read, and we would all do well to give careful consideration what we use, and how. And, in this go around, this batch of students seems intent on doing just that, which is gratifying in its own way.
And that’s what I’m reading about today. And probably all of Thursday, too.
