Silicon Valley companies don’t get the full range of dangers involved with online advocacy
Many prominent internet companies brag about offering services that help people “connect” with one another, making information more “open” and “transparent” and that they seemingly promote freedom of speech, access to information, and are sympathetic to the various struggles for human rights.
It therefore baffles me how little consideration they have for those individuals who need to be protected online especially if they use the internet as a resource to engage in risky (but necessary) activities. Anything from discouraging anonymity on the likes of Facebook and Google+ to requiring legit photos on sites like LinkedIn, not realizing that some of us live in areas where human rights advocacy is not just frowned upon but severely punishable by our governments. Anything you do to protect yourself – these companies consider to be against their “user agreement” forcing you to reveal sensitive information, making this field 10 times more dangerous just so these companies can be more “relevant” and therefore profitable. The problem is that we can’t just simply quit these services. We need them as tools to empower our work.
Every other week I’d get an email from an internet service stating that my account has been deleted or disabled.
Why? “You’re not using a real photo.” No, I use an avatar, which they deleted, and then another avatar, which they also deleted, and attempted to keep it empty, which they didn’t allow, and then finally resorted to just having a logo – but uh oh! Disabled again. This is despite my several attempts at communicating this to customer service reps at these companies. They couldn’t care less. Regardless of what their CEOs say at tech conferences. Irrelevant. They do not abide by these values when it comes to managing their companies and reviewing their user agreements and privacy policies. Do we matter?
Despite all that is being said about the future of the internet, and how great and open it’s going to be specifically in light of the SOPA debates, this remains to be a huge issue. We talk about censorship but we don’t expose the double standards of some of these online companies. Sure we can simply stop using their services – it’s theirs and they can do whatever they want to their terms of agreement (which to be fair we had to agree on before signing up on the site), but it’s still alienating, it’s still dangerous and the more and more companies that adopt these policies the more we risk losing in this struggle against censorship and surveillance.
I want internet companies to realize that they’re not doing their service a favor by alienating many of us who prefer to keep ourselves protected. There is certain information that we really prefer to simply not share. It’s not because we’re stubborn. It’s because not all of us are courageous enough to share every aspect of our lives, checking in from every location, uploading every photo, revealing our physical addresses or phone numbers. Some of us have a lot of reason to be scared shitless of the likelihood of being an easier target by ruthless regimes and armed groups if we did share all of these bits and pieces that these services require.
We’re not asking you to recreate your products to be more fitting for our needs. We’re not asking you to make your products more tempting for spambots and potentially abusive users.
We’re asking you to be considerate.
We’re asking you to make an exception.
For some of us out there, our lives literally depend on these little exceptions.
Respect our privacy if you want users to be loyal to your service. After all, you need us to keep churning up those big checks, don’t you? And we could also your help in staying connected without having to magnify the risks involved in our sensitive online activities.
Please don’t ban me from every service you produce simply for wanting to stay safe.
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To be honest, my feeling is that there’s something rather sinister about some of these social networking companies – I have this awful feeling that the real money comes in from selling information or access to information about their members. I’m not one who’s normally paranoid, and I’m not anyone remotely important or prominent – still… I’ve had this gut feeling that I must avoid them and to have as little info about my personal life on the net as possible.
I can’t help wondering if the pressure for real photo’s of someone like yourself, is really as innocent as it appears. It’s a bit Orwellian-sounding but maybe they have “clients” who place special orders? And that’s not even bringing in all the conspiracy theories about these sites being actually run by certain world governments…
Perhaps you should post a pic of yourself with a wig, scarf, wide-brimmed hat, huge sunglasses, taken in dark shadows, and compressed to a ridiculously low resolution, so that you’re totally unrecognizable? After all, it’s within your rights to select whichever photo of yourself you like, isn’t it? Unless they start expanding their rules to include passport photo style requirements (Look straight ahead; uncover both ears; take off your glasses; no smiling, etc).
The other alternative is to post a nice wide-angle pic of yourself in a landscape setting, where you appear as small as a midget, and again, compress to a really low resolution. I routinely drop the resolution of all pic’s of friends or family I might need to upload on the net, so that they’re virtually unrecognizable if they’re enlarged in any way.
Take care of yourself.
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I like to believe there will eventually come a day when people will realize the value their personal information carries, and companies like Google and Facebook and LinkedIn will have to provide a seriously valuable service to make it worth our while to disclose said information, instead of just requiring it to access their lackluster communities.
There is nothing Google Plus or Facebook offers that we did not already have, except a community. If that community became less inclined to just give away their data for free, the sort of criminal activities these companies enact upon us to harvest said data might actually be punishable by law as the theft it truly is.