Why Facebook Blows

Some thoughts after reading this piece in Wired (although this actual blog post could have been written anytime in the last few years).

Let's imagine that the US Government announced that they had started a web site. On this site, you needed to enter your personal information, including an address, and various interests. Once this was done, you could tell the government – via the web site – all about your day to day activities: what you read, where you were going, what movies you like, etc. Then, you could identify your friends, and upload pictures and video of these friends.

This is a small subset of what Facebook users do every day, by choice. Facebook is probably the single largest opt-in surveillance program ever seen. If any government ever tried to build a site like this – even with an ostensibly worthwhile goal, like mapping public services to people based on interest, geographic location, and perceived need – the outcry would be deafening.

Facebook's "services" – and I'm thinking specifically of Facebook Connect – extend that surveillance to what people do on sites outside of Facebook. However, Facebook's internal search – powered by their deal with Microsoft – will provide an enormous amount of raw data about what individual people want. Given that these searches will be conducted by people logged in to Facebook, the search strings used can be mapped to specific individuals. As we have seen before, even a little bit of information about search strings can lead to some awkward revelations.

When people get a glimpse of how much Facebook knows about them, they generally freak out. Yet, the freak outs subside, and people keep plugging away, adding more data into the system.

Okay, time to go. Need to update my status:

Adjusted my tinfoil hat. It had tilted precariously back, exposing most of my frontal lobe.