Right now Internet users are tending to solve the problem by delegating responsibility for their data to a third party who is supposed to keep it secure and supply it back to the user on request. This way you can upload data from one of your computers and download it (even automatically) on the others when you need it. For things like your files, email and contacts there are services available such as Dropbox, Apple's MobileMe and Canonical's Ubuntu One.

Some kinds of data are more sensitive than others. As a matter of policy I dislike making my data available to other parties unless it's necessary and I do it explicitly. It is well known amongst those who use email encryption that the encryption should be used all the time so as to not draw special attention when you do send something sensitive. This is also one example of keeping your data your own as a matter of course. Another advantage is that you use the same workflow all the time.

Suppose, as has happened before, I need to work with a digital copy of an art piece where all hell would break loose if it was leaked or shared. It would be downright stupid of me to upload it to somebody else's computers where I'm no longer directly responsible for the data. If I don't upload it, it can't leak, so the most sensible thing is not to do so. There's unlikely to be a problem even if I did use someone else's storage, but I don't want to take the risk. Now I need to start using special methods to move the data around such as an external hard drive or scp. How inconvenient. All I really want to do is to easily copy stuff over a network to the other computers without a middle man.

The trouble is it's a pain to set up that kind of service on the Internet right now. It won't really be viable on a large scale until IPv6 takes off in a big way. When that happens every device on the Internet will be individually addressable (and hopefully not excessively firewalled). Over the next couple of years this will become more and more attractive, particularly as the speed of Internet connections increases.

But why stop at ultra-sensitive data? Many of us store things like our email, instant messenger logs and social networking data on other people's computers. Google might even store your music and stream it to you. If we have a convenient method of synchronising our own data on our own computers we may as well do so and thereby eliminate the risks of losing direct control of the data. And we get an awesome backup system for free.

So we have this neat Diaspora thing coming out in a few months. It's going to provide decentralised peer-to-peer encrypted social networking. It'll hopefully be a little like Facebook with absolute control over to whom your data is given. I'm going to love playing with and possibly seriously using Diaspora but I doubt it will deliver enough convenience to steal many Facebook users, at least for a while.

I'm seeing something more here. The Diaspora devs explain that they want to make an extensible framework where anybody can create any sort of application or payload for sharing between peers. I reckon they're seeing a bigger picture where peer-to-peer is a necessary part of keeping our data private on the Internet. Initially, though, they're creating a secure social networking tool. That's a great idea because that's where users are hurting the most right now.

Diaspora or a project like it must succeed. I refuse to acknowledge a future of computing where users are expected to surrender data to others to get their work done on the Internet. It may not matter even most of the time. There is always a place for your own computer, your own data, your own control.

The cloud is getting more convenient all the time. With a little resourcefulness and work, peer-to-peer systems between our own computers can be convenient too. Then we won't have to throw out our old expectations of privacy for the sake of that convenience.

The mental instincts and mindset which I'd developed for social interaction using that website persisted for a couple of weeks. Having gained some offline perspective I was surprised and even ashamed of how I had begun to use Facebook. I would like to write a bit about Facebook and how it interacted with some of my vices.

The Game

I am not naturally a socially confident person. Some of the time I can't even bluff it but mostly I try to make up for it with enthusiasm. If I can't say the right thing, I'll err on the side of just saying a lot. Awkward silences are awkward.

But I know I'm not special. I think social insecurity applies to most of us at some level. However, we geeks have the advantage that it's pretty much expected. We can talk about it and joke about it with geeks and non-geeks alike. We interpret things literally, boy geeks suck at talking to girls, girl geeks suck at talking to boys -- you know how it goes.

The fact is that talking to people can be really hard. Facebook is much more comfortable for me as a geek because it is a website. I understand how the tool works. I am used to expressing myself through uninflected typed text. Most importantly, Facebook necessarily imposes a structure on the way social interaction proceeds. Aaah to have a bit of structure, a bit of logic in this crazy world which is people.

Most of what happens on Facebook is actually very simple. Disregarding application spam, meaningful posts normally take the form of a short textual status update, a link to an external website, a photo album or a larger textual Note. You can comment on any of these, and "Like" any of these, which puts your name underneath it as a supporter of the item.

Suddenly, consciously or not, Facebook is a game to me: to perform my best in the social world I want to optimise quality of posts against frequency of posts. How do I tell if a post is good quality? I see how many comments I get and how many Likes I get.

It's sad, isn't it? I would periodically review my Wall (which shows all my recent posts) and evaluate my performance based on whether I had any posts with no comments or Likes.

At the time I justified it differently. I had a notion that my brain comes up with cool things which I just have to share with the world, but I still don't want to bore everyone. If nobody is Liking my posts then I clearly need to work on increasing my cool-enough-to-share-on-Facebook threshold, hard though it may be.

Bullshit. I was playing a game. A game in which I try to demonstrate to myself that I'm a cool person and comments are the score.

Affirmation

I don't think I'm egotistical. I don't believe that I'm better overall as a person than anybody else. My goal is simply to be a like-able person. It's something I live by and I think it's a good thing.

Because Facebook is easier than real life social interaction for me, I began to prioritise it. I would check and post on Facebook while out and about with friends.

Sometimes I would think of a joke and instead of saying it right away to the small group of people I was with, I would save it to post on Facebook later. Many of those people would see it anyway, as would everyone else on my friends list. Bam, an efficiency gain right there.

Sometimes these jokes would be well-received and I would get the warm fuzzies watching people indicate their approval on Facebook some way or another. "Yes! I'm a good person! I can make people chuckle!" I would think. This in itself is not a mistake. I like to make people laugh and their approval was genuine.

The mistake is having that evaluation of self-worth depend mostly upon a single system, Facebook. The mistake is contorting myself to prioritise it. And it came about because it gives me structure, a quantitative metric for coolness and a sense of control.

Stalking

I don't like the term Facebook stalking. Stalking implies something malicious and dangerous. I'm sure this happens on Facebook but the majority of what people call "stalking" is simply viewing the profile of another user whom you don't know well personally, in order to find out more about them.

From a technical point of view complaining about this is stupid. If you don't want arbitrary people looking at your Facebook profile then you should lock down your privacy settings (as little as you can these days) to restrict access, or maybe not use Facebook at all.

In reality the situation is similar to the letter vs the spirit of the law. People put information about themselves on their profile but even if it's public, you're still creepy if you go and read it if you wouldn't get access to that information in person.

I did some of this contemporary definition of "stalking". It certainly wasn't malicious. For me it was just a low-interaction (safe!) way for me to find out who people are. I didn't do it a lot and the targets were a wide variety of people whose names I'd heard, friends of friends, etc. Nonetheless I have decided it was bad.

I propose a simple litmus test: Would you be comfortable meeting that person and telling them that you chose to go to their profile and learnt the things about them that you did?

In many of my cases the answer would be no. They would probably think I was creepy. If they published the information on a personal website or something like that I wouldn't have any concern at all. It is a problem I talk about a lot: on Facebook people have a perceived expectation of some level of privacy. It doesn't exist but regulating your own "stalking" shows respect to these people.

Friends are important

I've outlined some pretty bizarre thinking which I did when I was a Facebook user. It's fair to say that I feel like a bit of a knob.

It is important to say that I really do appreciate my friends. I don't take them for granted and they deserve as much friendship and respect as I can give them. I valued the things they had to say on Facebook and I was always genuine in my own comments.

I don't want that to be a game. I'm sure my friends would like their comments, both online and in person, to be taken at face value rather than to be unwitting participants in some scheme where I'm trying to achieve some definition of social success.

In case anyone's worried, I'm not worryingly insecure. I shouldn't be. I have many friends and I've had many of them for a long time. It's just that good inter-personal communication is still tricky. Not many people are exceedingly good at it. That's why I was sucked into some of these things which I'm not proud of -- Facebook offered an easier way to manage people.

Who's to blame? Me, I guess, but with these insights in hand I definitely won't make the same mistakes again.

I've found that there are two major flaws with this approach when it comes to Facebook.

1. Other users can add factoids about you by tagging you in photos, status updates and notes.
2. Facebook is increasing the amount of information which is consolidated from friends-of-friends rather than people you have directly befriended (and implicitly assigned some level of trust).

These two points combine to give a rather nasty flow of information--people can tag you in a photo and this is by default broadcast to all of your friends--even friends who don't know the person who took the photo or tagged you.

The permissions for the Photos application are fairly coarse-grained: either it can publish to your stream or it cannot. Since it's not very useful if you upload an album and it doesn't appear in your stream this option will be turned on for the vast majority of users.

This is another case of Facebook having poor privacy control options and hoping to annoy us into sacrificing our privacy further.

The data which you have to be comfortable having available publicly on Facebook include not only those which you personally approve but everything which Facebook allows your friends to make known about you. Your friends are probably a trustworthy lot, but it's all relative. When most people you know are marked as Facebook friends, including work colleagues, possibly you don't want your mates' photos of you being drunk scrolling past.

It's just setting you up to be embarrassed, really. To create controversy. This is what Facebook wants--more gossip, more excitement in your social world.

Yet the thing which is still weighing on me most heavily is that my entire list of friends is completely publicly available. I said in an earlier post that we still don't know what the consequences are of having that information readily available and easily able to be harvested by robots.

The fact is that I want it both ways. I don't want to have to hide with whom I associate, but I don't want it to be consolidated and made readily available for robots to be able to pick through social networks and work out significant links. It's kinda creepy and possibly useful for marketers, somewhere, or stalkers or spies.

Facebook is actively working against giving us better control over our privacy. They know fully well that most users won't even care. Of the few who do, like me, fewer still will actually cease using the free and completely voluntary service.

Still I wonder whether I'd be better off ditching Facebook. Again. In reality the damage has been done, but the information about me already in the system and on the Internet at large will become redundant faster the sooner I stop the supply.

I may be okay with that information being out there. Just not broadcast to everyone that quickly and easily, please.

The thrust of Jack's article is that Facebook is a bad thing and he quotes me providing a number of reasons why this is so. Just in the last couple of weeks I have returned to Facebook, which makes me look a little silly so by writing this I hope to justify myself.

Before I leap into my current opinion it is useful to describe my history with social networking. Near the start of 2007 I joined Facebook for the first time having held off on both it and MySpace for a year or two longer than most of my tech-savvy friends. I didn't have any special reason for avoiding the sites, except that they were closed networks, they appeared to be spreading like social virii and that some of the Myspace profile page colours made me want to tear my eyes out. It was simply an opinion, and by no means a strong one; just a vague understanding gleaned from reading factoids and opinions on the Internet.

I had joined MySpace a little while before, but by that time it was already dying with the hordes moving quickly to Facebook. Facebook of the day had a number of user interface issues which stemmed mainly from its similarity to MySpace. Even though I didn't like the interface, this probably helped them get steal as many users from MySpace as they did.

The emphasis was on individual users' profile pages, which were heavily customisable. You could activate various widgets and arrange them as you liked. The focus of each user's page was the "Wall" where you can leave messages for each other. Beyond that there were thousands upon thousands of gimmicky applications in which you play card games, dress up snowmen or give your friends eggs which hatch into cute animals. These were entirely pointless but they insisted upon cluttering up their users' profile pages and provided some advertising revenue.

Having quickly given up on MySpace I continued to play with Facebook over the next year or so. It was over this time that I learned about some of the implications of social networking. I caught up with a large number of people whom I hadn't seen for a while, some superficially, some not. I also saw people's changing relationship status being broadcast to world, incriminating photos and even had my own boss send me a friend request.

In January 2008 I was attending linux.conf.au in Melbourne, which was a fine congregation of geeks. I found myself in a discussion with some of them about the relative merits and problems, but mostly the problems, of Facebook. On a whim I decided that Facebook was not that important to me and a waste of time so I moved to where there was wireless access and deleted my profile on the spot.

By this time I was more aware of the social, privacy and technical issues in social networking and I was forced to spend some time thinking about them. Some of my friends pressed me for reasons why I no longer had a Facebook account. "Because I felt like it" wasn't a satisfying answer for either them or me, so I did a proper evaluation in my head of what my position was. By the time Jack asked me for my opinion, about which he wrote in his article, I had my thoughts organised and was able to give him a concise summary.

Even though I had convinced myself of the validity of the problems I identified, I wasn't entirely convinced of their severity, or whether they were insurmountable. Talking to Jack about it only increased my doubt.

A scant couple of weeks later I was back on Facebook. I was going to do it properly this time.

Today, I have approximately 100 friends identified. I know exactly who all of them are and would happily sit down and have a chat over coffee with any one of them. My privacy settings are strapped moderately tight---only friends can see my profile, and only friends or friends-of-friends can see photos with me labelled. I mostly use it to post bad jokes on my wall, the same as I do in person, and also to see what other people are up to.

Sometime in my year off they fixed the user interface. Now the main page when you log on is an aggregation of all your friends' walls. That's it, nice and clean. If you click on a user you get a page with their wall, and a tab lets you access their profile information. You have to look in a little sidebar for their applications, those irritating perversions which used to get in your way and eat your bandwidth. Mostly people don't even use them any more. In my opinion it is now actually convenient to use for its intended purpose.

So what was the stimulus that made me finally sign up again? It was an invitation to a friend's birthday party. He had organised the event on Facebook, as this was by far the most convenient way for him to contact the vast majority of his friends. He had gone out of his way to send a special extra invitation to my email address.

I felt a little embarrassed about that. He didn't say that it was inconvenient and there was certainly nothing to stop me attending given the information which was included in the email. As I put it to Jack, I felt like a "pain in the butt" making my friends go out of their way to include me while I was indulging my moralistic, perhaps paranoid views. Having reflected on it a little more it wasn't so much that I actually felt like I was causing annoyance. It was more that I felt like I no longer had a good reason why. So I threw my unproved assertions to the wind and here I am today.

Now that I've made my experiences clear I would like to present my Middle Path. A compromise, if you like, that allows me to use Facebook in good conscience while remaining aware of the problems.

Facebook is a public space. It is incredibly easy to forget this when you're swapping photos with your friends, chatting about things you did that day, and basically hanging out with the same people you do in real life.

On the other hand you'd better be prepared for anyone at all, including your family or even employers (potential employers too) to see anything you see or put on Facebook. There are two ways that this could eventuate.

Generally your more personal information is restricted to those you have marked as friends. If your friends are a hundred people, you can bet that sometimes someone who is not one of your friends will end up on a computer logged on as one of them. On my wall aggregation it's a weekly event to see posts made using drunk friends' accounts. All good fun, but it illustrates the point that your information being restricted to just people you know is a fallacy.

From a more technical perspective, you don't have any control over the information you submit to Facebook. Assume the worst. Crackers might steal all the friendship network data, all the photos and publish anything anywhere. Facebook might make mistakes of their own with your data and show it to the wrong people.

If you understand these risks I believe that you can exist happily and safely in the Facebook world if you're measured in how you use it. If you don't post photos or anything about you, you're not giving up anything. But there is a certain minimum commitment. One inherent set of data in your account is the list of people you care about most, the people you know best: your friends, family and whoever else makes it into your friend list.

You can lock your privacy settings down so that people can't see who your friends are, but if we're assuming the worst, remembering that you aren't in control of this information, you're stuck with giving up who your friends are if you want to be on Facebook.

In my case, I decided that I could live with that. I'm pretty certain that I don't have any private investigators snooping around trying to work out who my friends are, but I have no doubt that there are bots working to collect all the friendship information before we realise that it might be sensitive. However, when all is said and done, I am not a hermit, and it would take minimal observation of me in person to work out who my friends are. So I am happy to consciously commit to giving up that aspect of my life to the public world, even on the Internet.

Once you have taken that step the rest is up to you. If you're not happy for any person at all to see something on your wall, don't post it there. From a technical, logical perspective, that's all there is to it. Why is it not that easy?

I mentioned before that it is easy to forget that Facebook is public. You can be lulled into a false sense of security when you're interacting with people you trust. I have had a personal website for a number of years which has contained a variety of content and when I publish anything on there I know that it's there forever for anyone to see. The Internet Archive drives the point home with their Wayback Machine. It lets you see what a website used to be, going back many years in some cases. Facebook is the same but because it's not just you---you're just there mucking around with your friends---it is forgivable, if unwise, to forget that you're in public eye, even indirectly.

A feature of social networking sites seems to be that people like to inflate their list of friends. I have received a large number of friend requests from people I haven't seen for years, some as far back as primary school. The first time I used Facebook I was almost dazed by the number of people I could talk to again. I didn't have time to catch up with them before, so of course I didn't have time to catch up with them on Facebook either. The nett result was more irrelevant garbage getting in the way of the people with whom I was still actively interacting. Now, the second time, I have rejected requests from people I barely know.

A common complaint about Facebook is that it uses up a lot of time. This is a simple problem which applies to every other toy in the history of mankind. If necessary restrict yourself to looking at it only once or twice a day, or whatever it takes to rein in your rampant online socialising. Facebook is not a drug, but it's possible to get addicted. That's a reason to get a grip on yourself and go outside and enjoy the fresh air, not a problem with Facebook itself. Don't shoot the instant messenger, as it were.

There is one more almost silly reason why I thought I ought to get a Facebook account: to establish my name. It seems rather pretentious to say so, but as the site continues to grow larger, the risk was increasing that somebody who knows me would create a profile in my (unique) name. Whether as a joke or in malice, there's a good chance that the account would successfully make friends with people I know. That's something I simply don't want to have to deal with. I'm there now, so that's not a problem any more.

Overall I believe that I now understand the risks well enough to use Facebook without causing regrets for myself later. My fear now is for those who don't think about it: the people who will share around all kinds of photos, feeling safe, not realising that they may be compromised years later. Some users will become famous someday and their information from social networking sites will become hot property. Statistically that won't happen to most people, but there are other less public situations where someone might want to find information about you which you would rather keep to yourself.

I have intentionally said nothing about the quality of communication that occurs on Facebook. One of Jack's anecdotes is that he appreciated receiving a phone call much more than receiving a quick typed noted on Facebook. I strongly believe that people should meet in person, speak on the phone, write letters and have more binding communication than small snippets flung across the Internet. However, many people my age are using Facebook to communicate so it's my interest here to work out how to deal with it, rather than hope to make sweeping changes to the way the world works.

I also don't believe that Facebook should be a complete substitute for anything. If you are organising a major event, please don't make it centred on Facebook. A website is a good central point, with a group on Facebook to complement it.

If you've read this far, both Jack's article and mine, hopefully you now understand our perspectives on the issues and can use them decide what social networking means for you.

If you're friends with me feel free to come find me on Facebook. If not, either arrange to meet me in person or go away. Have a nice day.