Is it acceptable to borrow your friend's computer to login to a social network?

[kyle]

My first experience with letting a friend use my computer did not go that well. He accidentally deleted my grade twelve CS project. That was in 1985, and fortunately I knew how to rewrite all of the code.

There have been a lot of changes to personal computing since then. Email has actually been around much longer than this, but it became big around 1993. The web really started to heat up between 1996 and 1998, but it was actually around before that.

For a while it became somewhat common for people to ask a friend if they could borrow the friend's computer to check email. Then when social networking started to heat up, it became very common for people to ask a friend if they could borrow the friend's computer to login to a social network.

I am asking two questions here:
1) Is this even necessary?
2) Is it acceptable practice, or should "NO" be the acceptable answer?

My point of view about 1) is that most smart phones can now check email and login to social networks. So basically nobody has a decent reason to borrow their friend's computer for this, at least if they have a smart phone and a Wi-Fi account. The truth is that the person asking probably just wants to play games on a full screen.

Regarding 2) I would have to say that asking to borrow a friend's computer has become about as acceptable as lighting up a cigarette in a bar. You don't want their cookies, and you don't want potential virus threats. Moreover, you never really have wanted them to look at your personal files anymore than you would be willing to show them your diary.

I would like to see some public discussion on these points.

[Jack]

You bring up a lot of good points.

I am fortunate enough that I own several computers - one of which is my "blank slate" machine that has nothing but a baseline linux installation on it. I normally use it for experimenting but if anyone were to ever ask to borrow my computer I'd probably let them use that one, since there's no personal files on it and with a non-privelaged user account they can't really do much damage to it (and even if they did manage to muck it up, I can simply reimage it with no major headache).

But let's pretend I only had my one main computer available: I'd have to say no, I most likely wouldn't be comfortable letting someone use it. The only way I would ever let it happen is if I put them on a non-privelaged guest account and I hovered around them in the same room the whole time they were using it.

[Sean Ausi]

Its not accepable because they could put your personal pics and files out there. I don't have a facebook and I get really pissed when my mom posted me in my cap and gown on to facebook (apparently people I haven't talked to for 10 years found me and that's just fucking creepy). Anyways, if its an emergency, like business or jobs, then fine. As long as its a good friend that won't look at personal files, look through browsing history (I've had this happen before.... you know those annyoing popups? The first thing in my history was gay porn when my buddy was snooping through my stuff), etc.... oh, and I they do: they better have the common courtesy to log out.

[Toma]

Its not accepable