Wednesday, May 11, 2016

speaking of social media

Well I have been talking on this subject with a few people within ear shot.

In this post, I'll attempt to cover a few items of interest mostly focused around the fabulous, fear spreading, friendship, frolic filled site called facebook. (take this as your warning)


friends sharing time before FB

A bit of national news first - A lawsuit brought on by a few Illinois FB users has been given the go ahead to proceed by a federal judge. The lawsuit claims that FB's face recognition tagging system violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. I think it does.

I have never liked the idea of facial recognition. Sure it has a useful purpose in the hands of law enforcement but why allowing marketing people to use it?

I learned a small detail in reading about this case. The FB terms of agreement (I know lawyers who never read those things) states that California law shall be applied in legal disagreements with FB. This was brought up because California doesn't have a Biometric Information Privacy Act type of law. The federal judge ruled that doesn't matter in this case. I don't completely understand the legal reasoning but FB being such a large multinational company had something to do with it. I would be happy to see face recognition removed or restricted on FB.

You may have seen the trending discussion about trending news on FB. Apparently staff and algorithms control the news content that shows up on FB. This doesn't surprise me. FB monitors and control your experience on FB. The users get a free account in exchange for this monitoring and control. I just wish more users understood this. Also, I'm annoyed that people use FB to get news. It's a very unreliable source in my opinion.





Lastly, a FB and "A Few Clowns Short" story.


This afternoon I got "Sheryl Crow wants to be friends with you on Facebook" email. I thought that's strange. I "liked" her page long ago but why would a celebrity page want to be friends? I took a look at the page (now I know it to be a fake page). On first appearance it looked real then I noticed the amount of photos was ridiculous low - 2 pictures. I dismissed the request and marked it as spam.

Next I googled "Sheryl Crow facebook" and went to her facebook page (100's of pictures and videos).

On her real FB page there was a post about scammers creating fake Sheryl Crow FB pages. I learned from that post that FB uses a blue checkmark beside Sheryl's name in the header to show that the page is a VERIFIED FB page. I never knew FB had verified pages. So if you like any public figure, or brand type of page be sure to look for the blue checkmark next to the name in the header.

Of course now I don't know if Sheryl will ever directly be able to contact me since I would not trust the source. Also, if you want to know more about Sheryl and Lisleman please read this older post.

I have a constant love hate thing about FB. Sheryl is great though.

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