in the previous 2 articles on this topic (Facebook Privacy: The Limited Profile Blacklist and Facebook Privacy: Beyond The Blacklist - Whitelists) i discussed both selectively blocking access to certain things and selectively allowing access to certain things respectively... both of which have their place but both of which require a certain amount of trust in the person you're adding to your friend list...
if you participate in any of the social gaming on facebook then you know that the current game design du jour focuses heavily on rewarding the user for adding their facebook friends to the game... since it can be hard to find people amongst your real life friends who want to play the same games you do the easiest strategy for advancing in these games is to add strangers from within the game to your facebook friends list...
the social gaming is just an example, by the way, there are any number of reasons why you may be faced with need to add people you don't know well enough to call friend to your friend list and this can present a problem... how can you know the person is safe to add to your profile if you don't know the person yet? on the other hand, how can you get to know the person if you don't make a connection with them using the friend list?
it's a catch-22 situation but it turns out there is a solution which may or (as in my case) may not be obvious - make a second profile with nothing personal in it and connect to that person through this new non-personal profile... this non-personal profile is essentially a sandbox - bad things can happen with it and it doesn't matter because there is nothing sensitive, nothing of value in it... i don't just mean that you left out your real date of birth or your cell phone number or any of that stuff, it's also separate from your actual friends so if something bad does happen you won't be exposing them to any risk...
facebook may not like the idea of their users having 2 profiles a piece but they'll have to get over it because a sandbox profile fills a very important need - it gives users a tool with which they can build relationships from the very beginning, before knowing whether or not a person is trustworthy enough to add to their real profile, and without making the person jump through any hoops like getting to know each other via some alternate channel before adding them (i've done that, it's no fun being the difficult one)...
as i alluded to before, this was not an obvious strategy to me - which is a surprising considering i go on and on about the blacklist/whitelist/sandbox triad for malware protection - but it took a pair of ladies (laura ly and tammy vickery) to clue me in to this one... i suppose it shouldn't really be surprising, though... all things considered i actually would expect the fairer sex to have more experience protecting themselves from people online...
related posts:
Facebook Privacy: The Limited Profile Blacklist
Facebook Privacy: Beyond The Blacklist - Whitelists
1 comments:
Have you got a facebook page? Your posts are quite cool but they haven't got a lot of comments. maybe a page would help.
Anyway, i liked your posts! keept it up! :)
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