Posted on 10/13/2012 8:11:08 AM PDT by billorites
AUSTIN, Texas—Bobbi Duncan desperately wanted her father not to know she is lesbian. Facebook told him anyway.
One evening last fall, the president of the Queer Chorus, a choir group she had recently joined, inadvertently exposed Ms. Duncan's sexuality to her nearly 200 Facebook friends, including her father, by adding her to a Facebook Inc. discussion group. That night, Ms. Duncan's father left vitriolic messages on her phone, demanding she renounce same-sex relationships, she says, and threatening to sever family ties.
The 22-year-old cried all night on a friend's couch. "I felt like someone had hit me in the stomach with a bat," she says.
Soon, she learned that another choir member, Taylor McCormick, had been outed the very same way, upsetting his world as well.
The president of the chorus, a student organization at the University of Texas campus here, had added Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick to the choir's Facebook group. The president didn't know the software would automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were now members of the chorus.
The two students were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents.
"Our hearts go out to these young people," says Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes. "Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls."
In the era of social networks like Facebook and Google Inc.'s Google+, companies that catalog people's activities for a profit routinely share, store and broadcast everyday details of people's lives. This creates a challenge...
(Excerpt) Read more at professional.wsj.com ...
No way their dad and I would abandon my sons even if they thought they were homos. No way would I accept the lifestyle as who they are, either. I know who they are even if, God forbid, they took a walk on the wild side. It would be rocky. But we are all very tight and adore each other.
Agreed.
Much like a telephone or TV or the printing press, Facebook makes it easier to communicate, and once people communicate, things get found out that might not have been found out in the past.
I fail to see how openness is a problem for those who have sense to engage their brains before acting.
For those who don't... well... they have bigger problems than Facebook. Facebook just makes their stupidity easier to detect.
29 posted on Sat Oct 13 2012 10:47:07 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by socal_parrot: "In the book The Facebook Effect it says this in one of the intentions of founder Mark Zuckerberg, for people to live life as an open book with no secrets."
I did not know this. If accurate, it's good.
A good case could be made that Facebook is bad for people who have no sense and good for society as a whole because it enables people who like to research to do work that in the past it took a private detective to do.
That sounds like Zuckerman's view
Posting secrets on Facebook = not optimal
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