The General Intellect

Twitter is facing new legal actions by an anonymous football player after discovering that many tweeters have claimed to reveal the name of the player who allegedly had an affair with model Imogen Thomas. This is said to be the first action against Twitter and its users. The defendant is desperately trying to keep his identity a secret, so much so that his defense name is listed as “persons unknown”. The football player’s attorneys are claiming that Twitter is responsible for the publication of that information. The popularity of these tweets has very quickly attracted over a 100,000 followers.

Removing tweets would obviously be the best remedy in resolving these little mishaps but Twitter will only remove spam and illegal tweets. Others that have further looked into this situation have mentioned that there’s very little chance that the lawsuit will prevail.

At the time that this article was posted, the London-based law firm representing the footballer had not returned a request for comment. I wonder why, maybe it’s due to the fact that their chance of winning is slim to none. Taking these tweets to heart is silly. Everyone has a right to comment or tweet, as long as it’s not illegal. Now a days messing around with a model is just like going about any average day. So if a random person feels like starting some rumor, best thing to do is ignore! Now this wise footballer is digging a bigger hole simply by making this a public issue.

With pressure from the media, government and consumers, companies like Facebook and Google are forced more and more to address privacy concerns (including recent hearings in the Senate with Google). Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that Google is going to simplify it’s privacy controls. They are attempting to make the way in which Android users agree to share their data with Google more transparent. With internet becoming more and more reliant on handsets, and with the Android platform expanding rapidly, this will affect the data shared by millions of current, as well as potential, users. They will revise Google dashboard, a service that allows users to see what data they have shared with Google.

Alarmingly, the article claims that “more data has been collected in the last seven years than all of human history.” With such enormous amounts of data already collected and continuing to be collected at an ever increasing rate, the task of allowing users to manage this data (or for companies to manage the data themselves) seems arduous if not potentially unfeasible. Data collected on a phone may be shared by Google with any number of companies or advertisers, who can then disperse the data even further. There is no system, as of yet, to control this flow of data. There was a time when people were afraid to use their real names on the internet, where they hid behind a wall of anonymity. Today, more information is collected, analysed and used about individual than ever before.

This article found in the New York times talks about the ways in which people use Facebook and how perception of ones self and others can be analyzed more critically when viewed online. The author talks about seeing a post for a missing person and before simply re-posting it, to help in any little way, he had to second guess what that post might mean to other people. He thought at first, of course I should post this, but then thought that this serious post might rain on everyone’s Facebook parade.

The message of the article is about the strategic planning that goes into creating a Facebook persona. On Facebook people are just trying to be themselves but when did being yourself ever require planning? People use Facebook to promote themselves in hopes to entertain others with their wit and charm, or to prove their intelligence to others, so when it comes to what people post more thought is usually behind them. The author talks about a conversation he had with a friend about why she didn’t re-post the missing person message; the reason behind it being that she didn’t want people to think that she “was ostentatiously doing a good deed”.

Facebook is an outlet for people to broadcast themselves for others to see, in hopes to create the best version of themselves as possible. In doing this people put more thought into what they post or say on Facebook because nobody wants to taint their Facebook reputation. Personal branding is what we see everyday on the internet, and even if people claim that are just being themselves they are putting a lot more thought into who they want to be when it comes to the ways in which they put themselves out there.