I have an account, sure, back from '05 when I started college. I log in so infrequently that I often get emails from facebook along the lines of "you haven't logged in in 3 months. We think you should come back because...".
I never got into that whole thing about walls and public conversations and public comments. I'm far too self-conscious (and I judge far too harshly). The whole thing just drives me nuts. Some of my best friends and I are not even facebook friends.
Back when I was in college, 2003-2007, I remember going to lecture halls and sitting in the back. Every student had a laptop out, and all they were doing was posting garbage on other peoples walls. I was so disgusted with the popularity contest that was facebook, I vowed never to take part in it.
I guess I keep it around for the fringe use cases where maybe an old friend will move to my current city, and learn that I live here. Then again, I could close the account and never miss it.
I could not possibly agree more with you.
Had an account which I disabled end 2010 and deleted end 2011. I'm addicted to mindlessly clicking away on the internet and, unfortunately, I wound up doing that with FB too. I do have another account which is required to admin a company page, but it has no friends in it, near-zero discoverability and I rarely login there.
For a while even I raged against Facebook and people on Facebook, but the fact was that the problem was with me that I could not use it without bringing out some of my worst qualities.
It's wonderful not having the account, though. I recently ran into someone in charge of my High School's reunion this year and they couldn't find my address. I told them to look me up on Facebook later and that was the end of that conversation. Also, I don't get random "friend" requests from ex-girlfriends anymore.
It really didn't have anything to do with feeding the Zuckerborg. It just got incredibly tame very quickly, becoming less of a reflection of my friends and classmates and more of a reflection of my friends and classmates when our mothers and bosses are around.
It was amusing enough, but the amount of time I was wasting on it was out of all proportion to the actual value I was getting from it. I also didn't like the idea that I could be found by people that I didn't particularly want to resume contact with.
What if Facebook had a clean privacy record but still collected all of that data from us, in the name of providing the service (of messages, friends, social—your life on the internet, essentially)? Would they still be suspicious?
Facebook, on all accounts, is a business. A business is exists in order to make money, full stop. In today's world, user privacy, and ethical values do not exist in the economic formulas. Sure, it makes for great PR. But at the end of the quarter, those "values" would be crushed in an instance to maximize profit.
Make no mistake, your interests and Facebook's are completely orthogonal.
Facebook is not about "making the world more connected". I pity whoever believes that is true.
Non-profits also frequently serve this role.
There's a bit of confounding of this given the rise in popularity of what's called "Cause Marketing". Socially beneficial activities undertaken by (generally) traditional for-profits. Often seen as a marketing benefit. Not bad of itself, but it's helpful to remind companies that token measures don't absolve other actions.
It's fair to say that many traditional for-profits don't. Inclusive of social networking for-profits.
The problem of course is that nobody is willing to pay for something like Facebook. It turns out that our privacy isn't worth squat.
What does this mean? Who have they sold information to? There is a big difference between selling ones information and using said information to better target ads. I was under the impression they do the latter, which seems perfectly legitimate to me.
Therefore, even with the cleanest privacy record, FB still can be forced to give away your information. This can only be prevented by using decentralized systems, which pose a smaller target to the above groups, or by quitting FB and forbidding all your friends to ever mention you there.
(Another problem is that you want to grant access to your profile to someone, but you don't necessarily want to see their spam posts. If only there was some way to put people in "circles" or something...)
2. I think they introduced the 'Subscribe' feature to address the need for asymmetric sharing.
Accept the friend request, hide all their updates from showing on your news feed, and put them on limited profile view is one possible option.
That's not to say it's wrong, just kind of redundant.
Surrendering your privacy so that an institutional shareholder can make money is, emotionally, a different proposition and this is what the OP demonstrates. It's not that people didn't willingly surrender privacy before the Internet; but then, like now, it was done in a two-way transaction. The classic example is building intimacy with, say, your spouse, by telling them something that nobody else knows.
It is entirely possible that with Facebook a public company, some people (who were previously content) will re-evaluate whether they like the other side of the transaction.
1) I didn't want Facebook mining my data, and
2) It was dull and a waste of time. It doesn't help my procrastination, and the only things I used it for were the occasional IM, and... investigating people I was interested in getting to know
No matter how many smart people they hire, the UX of the site is continually worsened with each update, the ads they serve are neither smart or relevant and watching brands ruin their reputations through deleting comments they don't agree with instead of confronting the issues just makes it a terrible place to do anything other than stalk people.
In what way?
That's the thing that botters me the most in this whole thing. If things were already very bleak on the privacy side, that concern has just been blown to smitherings with FB going public. The data mining aggressiveness will only gain momentum as the company is pressured into delivering results to stockholders.
I've seen arguments like this made a few times, and I find them fascinating in the way they treat "data about me" and "me" as synonymous. It's like that old story about people who believed taking a photograph would steal your soul.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg
pretty much sums up my feelings...
What users demand is what programmers will deliver.
This is why it is so important for users to become educated about computers and networking. You cannot ask for what you do not know exists.
There are other ways to achieve "social networking" besides using only Zuckerberg's website and submitting to his warped ideas about human civilisation.
Collect the email addresses and contact info of all your Facebook friends now. You will need them in time when you will have your own "social network". A return to decentralisation is coming. It is inevitable. Everything goes in cycles. What's going to get us ethere is that centralisation has been abused to an unacceptable extent, by a sociopathic kid who is still maturing. Unfortunately he's maturing a little too slowly. I'm not sure users will have the patience to wait. They want an alternative.
FB's only value is your personal data.
They will likely end up having to give it back to you.
The web is going to get better. This is exciting.
