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inexplicable & unacceptable
Aug. 25th, 2013 08:52 pmLogging into Google News this morning, I discovered a featured video in the upper-right hand corner from CNN that Huffington Post was eliminating pseudonyms for users. I spent the majority of my day watching videos, reading articles from places off-site & going through as many of the comments over at HP about the impending change.
The funny thing about that last bit: it seems that HP, in its infinite wisdom, decided not to unveil this change directly to its users but instead linked to the CNN story about the policy change. The timeline of the rollout of the news was that Arianna Huffington made some mention about the switch on Wednesday & the managing editor made his appearance on CNN Friday (what some are calling a Friday-night news dump). HP included the story on its website not in a prominent fashion but instead let it drift off the main page & now it is warehoused in a sidebar in a low-traffic section. You can imagine the response the HP community has had to this.
It goes without saying that, if they implement this change, I will be deleting my account. Not that I was using the platform much anyway since this spring, but I have spent a lot of time & energy keeping my online & offline identities separate (as much as possible, anyway). For me, privacy concerns trump everything else. For others at HP, they pointed out that current & future employers would be able to pull up their comments & perhaps deny them employment; also, unbalanced persons might be better able to cull personal information & stalk someone, or worse.
At this point, about 14K comments have attached to the main discussion thread at HP. It'll be interesting if an official announcement is released when Monday morning breaks.
The funny thing about that last bit: it seems that HP, in its infinite wisdom, decided not to unveil this change directly to its users but instead linked to the CNN story about the policy change. The timeline of the rollout of the news was that Arianna Huffington made some mention about the switch on Wednesday & the managing editor made his appearance on CNN Friday (what some are calling a Friday-night news dump). HP included the story on its website not in a prominent fashion but instead let it drift off the main page & now it is warehoused in a sidebar in a low-traffic section. You can imagine the response the HP community has had to this.
It goes without saying that, if they implement this change, I will be deleting my account. Not that I was using the platform much anyway since this spring, but I have spent a lot of time & energy keeping my online & offline identities separate (as much as possible, anyway). For me, privacy concerns trump everything else. For others at HP, they pointed out that current & future employers would be able to pull up their comments & perhaps deny them employment; also, unbalanced persons might be better able to cull personal information & stalk someone, or worse.
At this point, about 14K comments have attached to the main discussion thread at HP. It'll be interesting if an official announcement is released when Monday morning breaks.