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IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too. Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular. On the flip side perhaps, humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that. IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too. Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular. On the flip side, maybe from a philosophical point of view humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that. I guess, I can say this since I've never been a heavy FB user and I see little of the benefits from it. Maybe I need to upgrade my friends. They say that to many, FB is the internet to them -- we'll see how this lasts in the long run. |
Are you being ironic with a statement like this, or are you serious?
The second there's even so much as a bug that affects some obscure privacy setting, the TechCrunch pitchforks are out, and the brand is on the line. Do you really think that FB is just gonna let anyone rummage through their user's private data, just, you know, for fun? Can you even imagine how damaging that would be? Why do you think FB blows millions of dollars on engineer salaries to work on privacy features — which you just dismiss in a sentence like they're nothing?
The way I see it, you're already in a database somewhere, many of them, but the difference is you don't have access to that data — you don't even know what data exists, where. Facebook comes along and says "OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible" — and suddenly, Facebook's the bad guy. All the government, banking, insurance, direct mail databases out there and people have to go after FB, where every click has an associated privacy setting. It boggles the mind.