Well I am not quite in the old-timer box just yet, although I am getting there. I really am fine with them sharing with me whatever public stuff they want to share. They don’t have to give me any dark secrets. These are not my kids, they’re cousins, siblings and nephews.
I basically use it o keep up with their interests for the most part and some family stuff.
My point is, I am on Social Media to keep in touch, not with the deep close people I call on the regular basis, but the people I’ll see a few times a year or every couple of years. Currently, Facebook is the only place where I can see the young ones and the boomers. I don’t have an alternative, so until I get that, I’m sticking with it.
I realize they’re harvesting my info and the bastards even use phone numbers for 2FA, but that’s the cost to have the links. Without FB i wouldn’t know someone was married, had a kid or that another was in and out of the hospital within the last year. There is literally zero effort by any of these people to communicate any other way outside of the people that right there.
The high school reunion I went to… also only on Facebook. And they had like two pages for it for some reason. One was abandoned and another created. That’s my generation screwing it up.
Well, there is a nominal fee. In the Netherlands, joining a Frat is much more expansive (I study 2 years in the Netherlands before moving to the US to complete my college degree), but you get a lot more out of it.
In the Netherlands, a single fraternity on campus is several times bigger, and more expansive, but that is because it replaces all the clubs and sports usually associated with US colleges (in the Netherlands, the school provides the library and the classes only, no clubs, no sports, not even dorms (for the most part)). On the other hands, tuition is almost free.
So, instead of paying a huge tuition, you pay a fraternity that usually has a house or building, and has halls, maybe a bar, maybe a boat house. They organize events and parties.
Fraternities have a cost, but it totally depends on where you are and what you join. My College had decades old fraternities that only exist at that school, so my costs were minimal (Ursinus College). The National ones have more fees.
They definitely can help you find a job, though. There are value adds like that.
Google is shutting down Google+, and only after the WSJ caught them hiding a pretty bad security bug that exposed a half-million accounts. The kicker about is that Google kept it hush-hush for months because they didn’t want to invite regulatory scrutiny. As soon as they got wind of the WSJ story, they announced the shut-down this morning.
Hey guys, we don’t want to invite regulatory scrutiny, so we’ll cover this up. What could possibly go wrong?
I think a lot of us have info in Google+. If i recall correctly, I was auto signed up for it and then they auto added contacts and then undid all of that, and I don’t know they dumped the data or how much of the Google account they pulled when they did that.
I think people might be assuming it doesn’t affect them because they don’t use the platform today. The trouble is, I am pretty sure freaking Google forced this on Gmail and Google Account users early on and then backed that out, but I assume they kept that data because of course they would.
So not actively using it today does not mean Google+ did not pull someone’s data through all these other ways they forced it.
I make no effort to track my kids social media (they are 25+) but my wife does and yes, it is easy for them to hide stuff if they want. Second accounts or with Facebook you can have areas that are restricted to certain accounts.
Facebook seems to think it can just AI itself out of this problem. They’re not willing to put in the man hours and, even if they did, they probably wouldn’t be as good as this gentleman. We’ve seen case after case where their efforts produce the wrong results even when they do try. They should hire someone like him to train them in the first place.
