Nikulas

“Contrary to popular belief, I am not friendly.”

 -Jasper Nikki De La Cruz, 2011

The recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policies are worthy of a class action suit. They’ve changed the default settings of my future posts. They’ve also changed the visibility of my profile. I am not being dramatic. I am being paranoid. I don’t like my personal activities and details being spilled out to the public.

Yes, I am egocentric, and so is everyone. But I work and complete transactions online. Once my email address falls into some shady character’s hands, my inbox would accumulate hundreds of phishing emails and cheap Viagra offers. Just last week, someone registered my email add to some financial news website with the username “Chang”. Maybe one of my friends pulled an Internet prank on me, but hey, everything is better done in real life.

I don’t play FB games and use any of those third party apps like God wants you to know… (technically a blasphemous thing if you are subject to the Judeo-Christian belief, congratulations on treating a Deity like an automated fortune cookie) because you give up your information to the app developers. God knows what will they do with your information. Don’t be surprised if you receive newsletters from sites you don’t remember signing up for subscription. Aside from collecting your personal information, these apps will ask you to abandon https and then use http. I am not a programmer so I won’t comment on this further. But the idea is that https is more secure.

Identity theft is pretty common in the Internet. Hackers, scammers and trolls are constant dangers. But I want to shield myself from the greater threats– people I am not interested in dealing with.

Public posts are ridiculous. Write a freakin’ blog if you want to flaunt something publicly. People will just google your name and be directed to your blog if they want to stalk you. If you are not eloquent enough to write long “whineded” posts, there is Twitter.

This is not a problem if only Facebook does not perceive their userbase as having a case of attention-deficit disorder en masse, but they do. I find it annoying that once a friend of mine is being tagged by his / her other friend, their entire conversation appears in my stream. A lot of other privacy options are being obfuscated too.

It seems like I am being anti-social in a social network, but I am not. If I could only choose, Skype is enough for me. The problem is 80% of my treasured friends and contacts is only exclusively available in Facebook. The nature of my work also requires me to run Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts as well as other social networks and message boards.

I only have 190 FB contacts, mirroring my real life friends. I just want to maintain my established relationships. If someone wants to be part of my life (and subsequently one of my FB contacts), they should have earned the spot.