A Serious Post About Privacy

If you are serious about keeping your personal information private and want to prevent corporations from using your personal data or taking advantage of anything you post on the internet all you have to do is post a note that states that you're not going to put up with this shit anymore. After posting the note you will receive all the peace and privacy you could ever want when you go and live in the woods without internet or human contact as this is the only way to achieve true privacy. You may be laughing but I am being completely serious (hence the title of this post) about the very important matter of privacy on the internet. Lately there has been a social virus infecting Facebook status updates across the globe. Those afflicted have been mindlessly posting copy and pasted 'legal' statements declaring sole rights to the things they blab on the internet or upload in the form of visual media and so on and so forth. These poor afflicted souls, whose symptoms present with apparent cerebral damage, ironically were most likely infected due to a lack of activity in the left cerebral hemisphere and frontal lobes. To guard against infection by this social virus you only need to spend a few minutes exercising your left cerebral cortex and frontal lobes. I recommend learning about privacy on Facebook as a means of not only exercising those portions of your brain but also immunizing yourself against viral panic that so often spreads through status updates.

You may have heard the anecdote about the picture-perfect family that discovered that their gorgeous family portrait had been taken from Facebook and used on a European billboard. These people did not have any sort of privacy notice up to protect their stuff- but they didn't have to. The company that made the decision to use that image made the conscious decision to steal from that family. The company was not in the right and is legally liable for theft. The family that was stolen from has every right to file a personal lawsuit against the company. No, short of not posting pictures at all, you can't prevent everyone from potentially stealing photographs or other media from your social networking page but you can easily limit the number of people who have access to that data by changing the privacy settings on your account or even on each individual post. If you want to make sure pictures of your toddler taking a bath are viewed by no one but family members you can easily adjust the settings to let you do that. I recommend you try messing with the settings for a few minutes of both permanent and per-post privacy selections.

But it's not just your pictures you want to protect. You want to protect your personal information as well. You don't want any random person armed with nothing more than Google to be able to dig up that you are a forty year old male living in the Denver area who checks into the local park via Foursquare every day when you walk your dog and that you're into both the Twilight Saga and competitive eating competitions and oh- this ten-digit number looks like a phone number. Change your general privacy settings so that only friends are privy to such information. You also don't want the company you work for to know that you weren't really sick on friday? Well, the easiest way to do that is to not post anything incriminating. But that can be difficult to sort out so the next best thing would be to not be 'friends' with or make links to the company you work for or be friends with other people that work there. You could try to exclude them through privacy settings but I wouldn't recommend it.

You may have also heard that Facebook steals data such as your likes and dislikes and sells it to advertisers.   Or that Facebook uses your information to customize things for you so they must just have a big database full of information that they can look at all they want and do whatever they want with. That's not true. Facebook does collect data- but only in the ways explicitly stated in their Privacy Statement. I recommend reading through it. If you find something that you are not okay with them doing then the only way to prevent that is to delete your account. If you want to be informed if they change the privacy statement simply 'like' the Facebook Site Governance page.  But despite what the fear-mongering stories you have heard would want you to believe people at the Facebook HQ are not looking at a list of stats next to your name telling them everything about you. The guys at the Facebook HQ are looking at aggregate data encompassing millions of users of which you are only one small plot point. Because the truth is that you're not special enough for anyone to want to spy on you specifically.

You may also have heard that Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation. You likely heard this in the context of: "Oh my god! Facebook is publicly traded that means they're going to be even more evil now!" In fact, the opposite is true. Facebook is now a publicly traded company and that means they now have shareholders that they must answer to whenever they do anything that might cause public backlash.

What you probably haven't heard is that it's not Facebook itself that you should be afraid of. It's the games you should be afraid of. You know how every time you decide to check out a new game you get a prompt asking you if they can use data from your page and your friends page and maybe even store cookies and other data on your computer? Have you ever read that particularly closely or even thought anything much about it other than that it was an annoying page between you and playing a new game that only required a simple click to get on with the game and not any actual comprehension of what they were asking? Unfortunately without clicking 'okay' you're not going to be able to play that game. Why? Because the makers of the games don't want to make free games and hope that you deign to give them some money in exchange for 'premium' pixelated items. They want to make money- period. And it's not just the games that want to steal your information. It's those cute little inspirational e-card applications, too. Any application or game that asks for some of your information doesn't just want to take your profile picture and put it on your little virtual farm. They want to know everything you're willing to let them have.

I encourage you to do everything you can to help protect your information and privacy but you have to remember that these are the two most important things: Firstly, if you are worried about other people finding out a particular fact about you- don't post it. Second, if you want true privacy all you have to do is click delete otherwise you have to make due. (But if you're really worried about your privacy you shouldn't just click delete to get rid of your Facebook you should also avoid MSN and Live, Google and all Google products and services, and try especially hard to avoid the worst culprit that is Yahoo and all it's products and services.)

Congratulations! You've now exercised your entire cerebral cortex and frontal lobes and prevented a viral infection that could have caused brain damage. Next time you see some fear-mongering 'pass it on' warning take a minute and use your brain and maybe a little fine motor control to click over to Google and look up whether people are spreading lies and misconceptions again.

New Look

Assuming you have read my blog at least once before this past thursday you will have noticed it looks quite different. The template with the dots and such was never intended to be forever. In fact, I intended it to be much more temporary when I started but, you know, things happen. I've been thinking about changing it to something a lot like this for a month or so. I even considered asking my coworker (who has a degree in "new media" but cannot find work in that field and does freelance stuff in the meantime) to design something for me but decided against it. You may notice some further (much smaller) blog changes in the future as I make things less messy and more functional.

My coworkers sometimes complain about the lack of fancy programs on my boss's computer to make awesome-looking signs and stuff. Between my Toshiba laptop (running Windows 7) and my Apple desktop (running Snow Leopard) I have both the Mac and PC version of OpenOffice, OfficeSuite for Mac (which I got back in the days when it still belonged to Microsoft and I needed it for a data-entry thing), Bean, all these dubious-looking Microsoft Works programs (anyone else remember when Apple still had Appleworks or ClarisWorks?) that I haven't used and a whole host of things that look like maybe you could make pictures on them in the depths of my Applications folder on my desktop computer. So naturally I made my entire background online using two very different and completely free programs. On the internet.

Presented in pseudo-code style:

>Launch Firefox
>>Goto Google.com
>>>Click on "more"
>>>>Select "documents" from drop-down
>>>>>Click on "create new"
>>>>>>Select "drawing" from drop-down
>Commence working
>>Look up certain quotes and equations for veracity
>>>Place all quotes and equations in separate text boxes for manipulation purposes
>>>>Change orientation, font sizes, add font effects, distort text box size
>>>>>Slot everything together closely on page
>>>>>>Fill in any large-seeming gaps

>>>>>>>Save
>ctrl t
>>Goto photobucket.com
>>>login
>>>>attempt to upload image from web
>>>>>error message
>tab back to Google documents
>>
  |
  |
  |
  |
  V
Download to computer
Upload to Photobucket from computer
 / \
  |
  |
  |
  |
>edit new image
>>add distortion effects
>>>Use all distortion effects at least once
>>>>Look through every possible image change on photobucket
>>>>>Ignore most of them
>>>>>>Finish
>>>>>>>Save copy
>Goto jacequin.blogspot.com
>>Select "design"
>>>Select "change template"
>>>>Click on "background"
>>>>>attempt to upload image from web to Blogger
>>>>>>human error - no such option available

  |
  |
  |
  |
  V
Download to computer
Upload to Blogger from computer
 / \

  |
  |
  |
  |
>Preview new template
>>Change settings so background image does not scroll with text
>>>Change template link settings to prettier colors
>>>>Decide prettier colors may be hard to read
>Tab back to photobucket
>>Mess with brightness and contrast settings excessively
>>>Decide that must be good enough
  |
  |
  |
  |
  V
Download to computer
Upload to Blogger from computer
 / \
  |
  |
  |
  |
>Preview new template
>>Forget to change settings so image does not scroll with text
>>>Grumble about tiling and have half a heart-attack upon the background scrolling
>>>>Change settings so image does not scroll with text
>Goto instant messenger
>>Message Chris to ask his opinion on the new look
>>>Realize multiple messages later that it is not Chris I'm talking to but some other very confused person on my buddy list
>>>>Apologize profusely
>>>>>Confused person agrees that it looks pretty good
>>>>>>Continue to change minor things in Blogger template for at least one hour
>>>>>>>Decide that Chris is probably not coming online in the near future
>>>>>>>>Ask other people's opinions instead
>>>>>>>>>Eventually get ahold of Chris who agrees that it is good and the tiling is okay.
>Go into human defrag mode

Text version of the above: I used Google documents (for which all you need is a gmail account or another e-mail address and to sign up) which is like officesuite but free, online, run by Google, and offering up to ridiculous amounts of free hosting to save your documents. Despite the "documents" name you can make more than just text files (presentation, like powerpoint, spreadsheets, like excel, drawing, like drawing, forms, like templates) and you can also share these documents to any collaborator you want (as long as they have a e-mail address) and allow them to either just view or also give them editing power. I used the drawing one and, of course, filled it with nothing but text boxes of normal and wildly distorted sizes, in various orientations filled with text and of various sizes and font effects. I tried to upload this image from web to photobucket but it didn't work so I downloaded the original to my computer and then uploaded it to photobucket. I used photobucket's image editing tools to add all the distortion and fade it a little. I had to download it again to put it on blogger and ended up deciding it needed to be darker overall so I changed that in photobucket, downloaded the new-new version and uploaded that to blogger. I had half a heart-attack when I went to preview and the image scrolled because I forgot to change that. When I was (sort-of) happy I tried to ask my friend Chris about it but messaged the wrong person who was very confused but still told me she (I think?) liked it. I then tweaked the template a lot but Chris still wasn't online so I asked other people about it until he eventually was and I pestered him. We both agreed that the tiling was okay even though tiling is generally evil and to be avoided on principle.

Conclusions drawn: Fancy software is overrated. I should look at people's usernames beyond the first two letters before messaging them. In the future I might remember that Chris is staying with people who might think constant internet is bad and we should maybe have an actual conversation at some point instead of all the "finger-waving" (as my father calls it) that we usually do.

The Key to Happiness is Online Shopping

      My favorite kind of retail therapy is the kind where I sit at my computer, click things, examine stuff and have it sent to my house. I enjoy the limitless selection, the low prices and my agoraphobia especially enjoys the lack of crowds. I like to look up stuff I have no intention of buying just to see what the prices are. I like to look up random things just to see if they exist. I love to speed through Amazon or Google check-out where I don't even have to put in my information. It's practically a magical experience at that point.
      I've read a few different things about what makes people happy lately. The interesting theory right now (probably best described by the Empirical Cynicist Nassim Nicholas Taleb author of The Black Swan) is that getting something nice makes you happy. Getting something nice worth as little as ten dollars one week and something of equal value the next week will make you happier than if you got something worth thirty dollars the first week and nothing the second week. Happiness does not scale up. If you get something really nice or make a lot of money all at once you're not going to be as happy as if you got small but steady rewards that, as a whole, didn't add up to as much material value as the theoretical lump sum.
      As far as work goes that means that working in the medical profession or as a salesperson is going to make you a lot happier than if you're a scientist. Helping someone by giving them a life-enhancing treatment or helping them to pick out the perfect cellular phone for their needs gives you a steady diet of small rewards. Picking M&Ms and eating them one at a time will be a lot more satisfying for your sweettooth than getting a Snickers and scarfing that down in three bites. Searching for the cure to a crippling disease year after year with no results until finally after decades of work you discover that cure and win a Humanitarian Award just wont make you as happy as being a doctor. Your brain just is not wired that way.
      But since we can't all have steadily-rewarding careers we need some other plan to be happy. Which is where I like to digress back to online shopping. The online shopping experience itself is very enjoyable. You can sit in perfect comfort in your favorite chair, totally naked, while drinking beer, eating chips and watching sitcoms. Regular shopping means you have to stand up. You have to be wearing clothes, possibly uncomfortable clothes. You cannot drink or be under the influence of anything more mind-altering than caffeine. You can't watch television when you do it. You have to go out of the house where there are other people and actually interact with them. You probably have to drive or at least walk someplace. You have to go into a store and see if they have a product in stock and examine the package scrupulously to see if it's what you actually wanted. If you want to comparison shop you have to go to multiple places and look at many different products to figure out the best deal. Most likely you will find this process exhausting and expensive no matter what you're buying.
      Going back to sitting naked at your computer. You're comfortable. It's easy to comparison shop at dozens of different places in a short period of time. It's easy to see whether other people in similar situations were happy with the product you're considering. It's easy to see whether the product is what you want and check out the specifications. It's easy to get a really good price without going anywhere. It's all very easy.
      Not to mention that ease and comfort aren't the best parts. It's often significantly less expensive to buy products online. When I check-out online I always feel very satisfied. I found what I wanted and got a good price. It makes me happy. For the next few days I get to happily anticipate when my package will come. I don't like to obsessively check the tracking on things I order so when they show up it's a surprise. Everyone loves surprises. Especially good surprises. And it's always shipped in a box of course so you get to open it up and unwrap it just like a present. To take it out of the packaging and read the instructions. And then you can tell people about it even if it is not the most exciting thing in the world. "Today my new coffee carafe came. It was exactly what I wanted."
      Ordering things, anticipating them and having them finally arrive are all good for your brain. People like to shop because it actually makes them happy. You get a nice release of dopamine in your brain. that's why some people can become addicted to shopping. But at the same time dopamine is an antidepressant. So the next time you're feeling down or you need something that you don't have to have immediately do yourself a favor and get on the computer and order it, you'll be a happier person. But remember: Don't order your groceries online and always shop in moderation!