Oddly enough, a lot of Apple Fan boys are hackers but make the (2)-style arguments "you might not like this device but it's great for my mom who knows nothing about computers"
By and large most of those devices don't require you to hand over tons of personal (and potentially sensitive) information just to use them.
Edit: My point being that advocating on behalf of mom and dad when it comes to technology shouldn't be frowned upon if it really does make their lives easier and better.
Oh? What about the graph of everyone that you want to connect with and much of the communication between you and your "friends" (which is only boosted by these new features)?
Obviously if you want to follow your friends' activity and exchange messages with them over Facebook, you have to follow your friends' activity and exchange messages with them over Facebook. I'm not sure what the objection is here.
The point is that Facebook is based on trying to convince users to hand over as much private information as possible without making it seem like a bad thing (or even alerting them to the fact that everything they are doing is being recorded for the financial gain Facebook).
A lot of the 'lowest common denominator' people probably just see Facebook as a tool (or 'the internet'). They don't normally think about whether or not the hammer they are using is recording statistics on them from behind a two-way mirror, so why would they think the same thing of Facebook.
If a geek suggests that his parents should get an Apple computer because "It's 'just works' for my mom" it's not the same thing as Facebook because an Apple computer isn't monetized on the idea that Apple will coerce as much personal information out of your mom as is possible while trying to leave her as clueless as possible to the implications of doing so.
You don't want companies that you're a customer of to know your private information, that's fine, don't join them.
Personally I'd like it if my bank knows my name when they initiate a call to me.
You might like a bank that acts like this:
"Hello Customer with ID 31059283, your bank account balance is negative five dollars and is overdrawn. The last transaction was an eftpos transaction for $5 at a fast food restaurant. We are unable to tell you any other transactions prior to your account being overdrawn because as a matter of privacy policy we only store the last piece of transaction data. "
Well, I don't. Companies that don't know anything about me don't have my business, they just can't compete, like the Ford Model T.
Edit: My point being that advocating on behalf of mom and dad when it comes to technology shouldn't be frowned upon if it really does make their lives easier and better.