The article I read was in regard to a man (Derek) joining an online social networking site, Facebook to be more specific and his primary purpose of using this system was for work purposes, to get everyone that usually converses with co-workers, and people who are interested in the Canadian Union of Public Workers and interested in labor issues in general. Derek was using the site to learn how to organize members and those potential members. He began adding people as friends who were already involved in groups or had interest in labor issues and the kick to this story is the majority of these people accepted his friend invite. To Facebook this was a suspicious act so they warned him that his account would be deactivated if he continued these actions. The problem with this accusal is that Derek wasn’t informed what an acceptable pace of adding friends was, and it wasn’t given in his notice. He continued on in confusion and later received an email stating his account was being canceled because he had not complied with their requests, and the decision was final. After people got wind of this Facebook’s actions was labeled as anti-union. As the issue grew and reviewed more in depth it was obvious that Derek did nothing wrong and Facebook officials reinstated his account. The strange thing about this whole story is that he was under the impression that his account was cancelled and that was final. Apparently it wasn’t final, so who made this claim, and why were all of these Facebook officials not on the same page? This just shows how these social networks try to enforce policies that are not posted explicitly nor are they addressed when they are giving members notice of disapproving acts. They are taking ownership of data and privacy to extreme lengths in certain cases and this does not give equal opportunity to all users. Users like Derek in this case are not informed of the networks limits until it is too late, and this is wrong. “Facebook is a black hole of algorithms. Users are cut off when some calculation is tripped and the user is flagged for abuse and charged by automatic emails. Even more unsettling than Derek's rights being taken away in the first place was the way they were reinstated.” To any user this would be frustrating and now that I have learned of this story it makes me wearier of using social networks such as this one and others.
This just goes hand in hand with our society and all of the issues that we have been dealing with since the terrorist attacks no one has privacy anymore and people are questioned for the littlest of strange activities. This is also apparent in the same manner how our government continues to try and get more power over the citizens. Technology only makes these processes happen faster and more easily. So the real question is how do we combat that? In this case, my answer is by not joining sites such as Facebook, or MySpace. Otherwise read the fine print and know in the back of your mind these sites can deactivate your account at any whim.
