Yes, the news media can get into Facebook! So can your mother!
Giuliani’s daughter caught in Obama campaign Facebook group:
On his daughter Caroline’s Facebook profile, the self-described liberal was a part of a group that supports Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential bid. After Slate.com emailed her about her about it, she immediately left the group, the web site reported.
People. For the last time. Facebook is not secure, okay? Even if you have your profile totally locked down (this would include blocking, say, the faculty at your institution, particularly if you plan to lie about funeral attendance to get out of class*), a public group will still show your membership, and only one person has to see you in that group and tell Slate, and then CNN picks it up, and then you are IN THE NEWS. Particularly if you are Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, and thus already of some baseline interest to the media. Although frankly, if you are Giuliani’s daughter by Donna Hanover, I’m not sure why you’d be making any effort not to embarrass him.
And apparently she didn’t even have her profile locked, although Slate.com reports that she “uses a slight variation of her name on the Facebook site.” Several Slate comments assert that this is no excuse:
She is a kid, not a public figure, regardless of the technical legal status of the information posted on Facebook. That may matter to your lawyers but not to ordinary people. Do you not care about her as a human being at all? Is there no common decency left anywhere?
…
Yes, you as one of the 42,000 people affiliated with Harvard or Trinity were able to see it, but that doesn’t mean that you had permission to publish it for the general public’s viewing on Slate. While I don’t support Giuliani, I don’t think that it’s fair to invade his daughter’s online privacy either.
Look, there is decency and then there is verging-on-idiocy. How many stories have to be broken through Facebook before users figure out that it is NOT PRIVATE? Personally, I prefer to believe that Caroline Giuliani did it on purpose and then left the group out of some kind of misplaced after-the-fact guilt, because that is nicer than thinking that even the most recent wave of Facebook users, freaking 17-year-olds who probably can’t remember life before the internets, cannot figure out that if you post something “private,” “secret,” or “illegal” on Facebook, SOMEONE WILL FIND OUT.
Facebook! Is not! Private! And you are not doing anybody any favors by pretending that it is, because as this story demonstrates, there are too many people who are not going to go along with your magical fantasy world. Would you teach your children that everyone always uses their damn turn signals?
And then there was that story that CNN presented as unmitigatedly heartwarming, although I thought it was a little weird and obviously an extreme outlier: Mom reunites through Facebook with son she gave up for adoption
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*True story.
August 6th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
The vibe I’m getting from most of the stories on this episode does kind of imply that his daughter’s motives were at least sorta-intentional, as she and Rudy don’t seem to be on very good terms. Politically speaking, I have to think this isn’t going to be good for a guy already comically lacking in the “family values” department.
August 6th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
It’s amazing how little the average user understands about how Facebook and other social networks operate. Actually, scratch that, how little people understand that if you put something, anything on the interwubs, it will be found.
Sigh, educate and evangelize, educate and evangelize, and maybe we’ll get people to understand.
August 6th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Yeah, well. Someone whose blog I read recently said of potential online embarassments “the best way to make sure no naked pictures of me end up online is never to pose for any naked pictures.” I think I’d go along with that (unless you don’t care who sees naked pics, in which case…) You just do have to be careful. And anyone who doesn’t think “Would I care if ANYONE saw this? My granny? All my real friends? The government?” - as you say, they’re in a fool’s paradise.
I’m not really one to talk, as if you google me, you get me - and you also get my current e-mail address, which was not intentional. And at least one real friend has found me through my no-real-full-names blog. I’ll have to ask him how he did that.
Facebook does seem to tread a strange line between anything-goes and slight Big-Brotherism. I have been having mild conniptions in case Facebook bans J for flippantly using the “course” option to say that he and a friend “took various illegal substances in 1998″. I don’t THINK it’s very likely, but then again Sheepcat got banned for being a cat, and last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to be a cat*.
Nor is it much of a crime to disagree with your parents’ political views, I’d have thought, however well-known the parents - is it really that big a deal in America?
*Actually he got banned for “using an alias”, and right enough, that’s not his real name, but I think they might just still have banned him if he’d been on as Ollie Cat.
August 6th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
K: Facebook has always been particularly hardline about the whole “only real, living human individuals get profiles,” which is what killed Friendster and drove everyone to MySpace, but given that MySpace is already there, they may not be unwise to hold to that niche; I don’t know. My ability to send messages got suspended at one point because I sent too many inviting people to a group for people named Cabell. Excuse me if there was NO OTHER WAY to do it. Anyway, the threatening generic message that accompanied the suspension turned out to be pretty much nothing.
As for Caroline Giuliani, the real issue, as Nick notes above, is that her father (mayor of New York) treated her mother like shit and stopped attending her and her brother’s various high school events when he married some other woman. So it’s not as much that she’s got different political views as that she’s living, breathing testament to what a shit the guy is, and him in the Family Values party.
Daniel: Soon I will be a TA. I’m hoping to use this platform to get the students to understand, at the very least, that they can block ME from having direct access to their Facebook profiles.
Nick: Yeah, I just kind of wondered why she left the group when it was reported.