[maskedinvader]

Facebook is not forcing you to give them your personal information ? I understand and pretty much agree with most of what you say but can we agree that Facebook is simply another company trying to make money and be a thriving business and not an evil organisation trying to take over your life and destroy your liberties ? capiche ?

[evincarofautumn]

This. If there is evil at Facebook, I haven’t seen it. It might be big, but at the most basic level it’s just a directory of people where you share stuff and see some ads to support the site. That’s not unlike the vast majority of sites that we all use every day.

Besides, the goal of advertising on Facebook is to provide suggestions to people that are actually valuable. It’s good for people to get discounts on products they like, or information about new things to do in their area. It’s good for businesses to make sure their ads are shown to people who might actually care about the product/service/event in question. Making money is just a happy side effect of creating actual value.

[Karunamon]

>Making money is just a happy side effect of creating actual value.

Pretty much Google's MO as well.

Aside: People really need to stop bandying about the word "evil" as a value judgement, it manages to be inaccurate, non descriptive, subjective, and emotionally loaded all at the same time.

Every time Google changes the slightest facet of their service, the idiot crowd starts up with "WELL SO MUCH FOR DONT BE EVIL HURR DURR!!1" Facebook much the same, except it's just become hip to hate on them after all this time. Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose.

[throwaway2048]

>Every time Google changes the slightest facet of their service, the idiot crowd starts up with "WELL SO MUCH FOR DONT BE EVIL HURR DURR!!1"

By using rhetoric such as this you are lowering the discourse on this site every bit as much as the straw man you created.

[evincarofautumn]

Anecdotal people aren’t necessarily strawfolk.

[CaptainZapp]

  If there is evil at Facebook, I haven’t seen it.

For me Facebook's relentless race to the bottom in terms of privacy, their underhanded tactics on re-fiddling privacy setting defaults and their relentless push to try getting me to give up ever more private data was evil enough for me.

Evil enough so that I "deleted" my Facebook account and don't intend to use the service ever again.

Your mileage may (and apparently does) vary.

[pessimizer]

>another company trying to make money and be a thriving business

>evil organisation trying to take over your life and destroy your liberties

This is a false dichotomy. I'm not sure why you think that it's impossible for Facebook to be both of these things.

[mpyne]

It wasn't a dichotomy in the first place. The commenter said that the first applied and the second didn't, not that they were mutually exclusive.