Monday, December 28, 2009

Rant’s Raves and BLOCKS!

I am writing this blog as a rant and rave about Blocking and Listing these are my concerns & suggestions as follows;

We’ve all found it necessary to block someone and at least in my view block means I don’t want to see them, and I don’t want them to see me. Recently I’ve been Re-tweeted amongst people I really don’t want to see. Nor do I want them seeing me.

With the advent of lists and the present Re-Tweet system involving lot’s of names. It is very easy for someone you’ve blocked to still read your entire stream.

There are many concerns, involving security/Privacy breaches. One of the many concerns I have is that I have had many underage (that's if they are even underage followers some people have avatar BABY PHOTO's, How do you really know!?) followers that follow celebrities request to follow me. Also many followers with out photographs who are very private about who they are request to follow me as well. I have blocked these underage and suspicious followers but my greatest concern is my tweets can still be seen by the youth/suspicious followers via lists.

All that would need to be done is if they try find who’s lists that I appear on and follow those lists. The only protection against this is to lock my account which in my opinion negates being on twitter at all.

 There are private lists, which an individual person cannot see. But the public lists are available to all. And listed in the front under the number of followers you are following. That’s why most of my lists are set to private. Unless the followers are Social media guru’s who don’t mind being seen or contacted by anyone.

So if you block anyone make sure that you also remove them so they aren’t on any of your lists!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And that doesn’t really do any good because even if they are blocked they can still follow one of your lists. They can also perform searches through the search engine that brings up their tweets. They can just go to your main page, even if they are blocked.

I’ve had security concerns since day one that the lists came out in beta. Because, we had a preditor on twitter sometime back. When blocked, such an individual can follow a list of “Friends” and read everyone’s time lines.

So my final analysis is that blocking is ineffective! Boy am I annoyed by seeing my name especially when im Re- tweeted by someone I blocked! Or mentioned in another person’s tweet with the same person ie., followfriday’s or any other lists of random names. What can we do about this?

I don’t need this and neither do you what are your thoughts about how we could possibly have this changed.

Sincerely,
Sarah Saldana

1 comment:

  1. GREAT post and exactly what I'm going through right now. I went through my friends list and actually removed most of the people (I left two people) that were mutual friends with my personal psycho. Just tonight though, an issue with that came up.

    Blocking does NOTHING but keep them from "officially" following you. Oh, they still follow you, they just have to take a few extra steps to do it. But, not enough to stop them! I want it to where they don't even see your name on Twitter if they are blocked. Just like Facebook. If a blocked person on Facebook is even mutual friends with someone, they will not even see anything having to do with you. Even replies to the same post you post. I love this feature. I've had to change my Twitter name several times. But, I lose my followers. I'm just now building them back up. It seems stupid to go private on Twitter and you don't build up your followers that way either. I could go on and on, obviously!

    I feel your pain!!

    ReplyDelete