Why You Should Be Scared Of Facebook
I am writing this note to raise awareness, particularly for normal people, about Facebook's recent privacy changes, and why these changes are not just creepy, but a sign that you are endangering your privacy by putting your info into Facebook's hands.
A few weeks ago, Facebook added the "Instant Personalization" feature. This enables any website to look at your Facebook profile and see your interests, friends, posts... essentially everything you've put on Facebook, and use them to tailor the site to your supposed tastes. Even if you turn this off, your friends when visiting the site can share your info without ever knowing. You can find the full details on the Instant personalization feature, and the Open Graph A.P.I., here.
This is the most frightening step yet in a long history of privacy screwups -- even though people flocked to Facebook just 18 months ago because, supposedly, it gave you much better privacy.
In that space of 18 months, users, businesses, and massive corporations have gone from loving Facebook to loathing. Facebook's steady changes to its terms of service and privacy policies are slowly working to nudge users in the direction of total, unnecessary, unwanted openness. To this distaste, shock and disgust was added as details began to emerge about Facebook's CEO, the backstabbing, amoral genius Mark Zuckerburg, to whom a wise Warren Buffet quote applies: “Look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you."
It's not that Facebook just ignores privacy; they have essentially declared war on it. To quote an excellent Gizmodo article:
[Mark Zuckerburg], in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ... Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch. At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).
Now, essentially the only way to use Facebook is to assume all your content is public, which, obviously, places many restrictions on people who want to have the life accessory that Facebook has been for a while now. We cannot put our digital lives in Facebook's hands.
Which is why I request that you all stand up with me. May 31st is Quit Facebook Day. I highly encourage you to take action. If you do not wish to delete your Facebook, I recommend that you follow this guide. From then on, use Facebook with awareness and care, keeping track of privacy changes and what you post on the site, and what your friends post about you. Also, if the only reason you want to keep Facebook is for communication, follow this excellent guide on how to strip everything unnecessary out without dropping off the map.
And although there is currently no full-featured equivalent to Facebook, there are absurdly large numbers of contending social networks. Twitter, Ning, and many other websites provide excellent platforms for staying in touch with your friends. And if you just have to have a social page with all the power of Facebook, there soon will be an answer. The Diaspora project is an open-source project to build a Facebook contender that is distributed; that is to say, everyone fully owns and controls their own profile (or, as it is called in Diaspora, a "seed"). You can donate to this project here.
Thank you for your time. Whether or not you decide to delete your Facebook on May 31st, I hope you found this article informative, and that you will stay aware of Facebook's privacy and Terms of Service changes. I recommend keeping track of this subsection of the Mashable.com social media news website.
Best,
Matt
Posts that I make will be uploaded to http://elnerdodegeek.posterous.com/
Email me at hybrid120 [at] gmail [dot] com
Sharing is caring!
This work by Matthew Pherigo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
