This time it's personal

Alastair Harper July 24, 2007 12:00 PM http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/alastair_harper/2007/07/this_time_its_personal.html Our privacy is a farce. As you read this, the cute bod you met last night has found your Facebook profile and is sniggering at the photo of you, aged 16, looking an idiot at an Ibiza foam party while lifting a delighted alcopop to the camera. You'd told them you were a Rhodes scholar. Your number has already been deleted from their phone. The Sun is now able to do odd little stories about a policeman being homosexual and, dear Lord, actually admitting to it on his Facebook profile. They justify the story by saying he was recently promoted in the Transport Police - meaning he now might guard high-profile passengers, So if, say, the Queen were to catch the Central line to Bethnal Green in order to have a look around Whitechapel market, he might possibly be one of her many guards. The issue, according to the Sun, is that his profile has made him a target for terrorists. And he is gay. Oxford University can now use the pictures put up by friends of some poor Bullingdon sap burning peasant villages and discipline him. Or congratulate him, I'm not quite sure how it works up there. It's amazing how much easier the internet has made it for fools to be foolish. Intrigued as to Facebook's ability to find friends through your email username, I managed to accidentally ask everyone I had ever emailed to be my friend. Everyone. Imagine it was your job to very occasionally interview quite important people and so have email contact with them. Imagine what you'd feel like when you asked cabinet ministers or an elderly and very respected playwright to join you on, of all things, Facebook. Meanwhile there are infuriating little applications trying to extract every bit of data they can for their marketing departments, hiding under the guise of turning you into a zombie or inviting you to cyber-kick someone in the jaw. I remember working for an internet company and coming up with these sorts of things: made in half an hour to hook stupid people into revealing all their information for no reward other than getting a little profile of their dog. The thing is, any social networking site is completely pointless for keeping in touch with friends. You don't socially network, anyway. That implies some cyber cocktail party where you see someone else is a fan of both the Television Personalities and Knut Hamsun and start a wonderful relationship before moving on to the chap that has also flagged his interest in Joseph Priestly and the Holy Modal Rounders. In reality, the only thing you do is receive requests from the people you hated at school and weigh up in your head if it's worth having them being able to look at your life in exchange for you having a good nose around theirs. Keep your fingers crossed - they might have a crack addiction. Actually I might be wrong about a choice when it comes to adding someone. There seem to be strange etiquette rules that I don't quite understand. I was once called "extremely petty" and thoroughly told off by several friends for denying a request from someone that I was very open (especially to him) about disliking. They were also very open about disliking him too, but they had not refused to add him. The idea that I want as few people as possible to be able to report me to the Sun when suspicious photos of me playing with a police truncheon go up just doesn't seem to occur to them. The last thing I want to have happen is what occurred to two of my friends last week. Having been happily engaged for the last few years and, apparently, looking forward to their wedding in late summer I logged into Facebook to see a little gif of a broken heart and the casual announcement that x and y are no longer engaged. It must be some sort of electronic glitch, I thought. But a click on the former affianced's profile showed her receiving cyber hugs from various members of her ex-beau's family. In fact it was how his family found out. Phonecalls surged from America and the Middle East as cousins alerted their non-information age fathers to the sudden change in their nephew's life. So for the last week traditional Muslim patriarchs have been calling him every few days to have a little conversation about how he chooses to take out internet advertisements before telling his family. Once the phone stops ringing he intends to delete his profile.