This weekend one of my friends (IRL) asked me why I wasn't on Facebook. She was shocked, as many who know me are, when I tell them I am not on facebook. They see me as a internet guru. How can an internet guru not be on facebook? What they don't know is that most Internet Gurus I know are also not on facebook.<p>The reason I am not on facebook is quite simple, I do not want to give facebook my private information, because I do not trust Facebook. I do not trust Mark Z. I do not believe that they have individual users' best interests at heart.<p>What I do believe is that they are interested in getting more users, sharing more information, and making more money. None of these are in my best interest. In fact, as Facebook gets more users, the quality of facebook will continue to decline, as will their treatment of those users.<p>It takes a lot of money to operate 10,000 servers (or however many they have at this point). It takes a lot of ad revenue. It takes a lot of people and investors. All of that means continued focus on the bottom line to ensure survival.<p>Facebook's only value is in the information people put into it and they will do what they need to do with that information to keep powering those tens of thousands of servers.
Wow, this is pretty lame. The various stuff I've become a "fan" of (apparently now renamed "like") was under the understanding, explicitly stated by Facebook, that it wasn't part of the public information. Seems they changed that without warning or opt-out? Is there at least an easy way to quickly remove all the hundreds of things I've become a fan of before Google starts indexing them, if I'd prefer them not to be indexed?<p>What I'm getting from this is that you should assume that <i>all</i> your Facebook information is publicly available, and act accordingly, because they could make it so at any time. At this rate of trustworthiness, I wouldn't be that surprised if in 2 years status updates were made retroactively public with no opt-out (and maybe without even telling you).<p>Edit: Is this even legal? Consider the following scenario: Someone signed up for a Facebook account 3 years ago, and entered some of this information, at a time when their privacy policy explicitly promised that the information would not be shared. They have not logged in since, so cannot be said to have even implicitly agreed to a change in the privacy policy (and Facebook has not mailed out any notice of the change). Now their information is made public, in violation of the privacy policy. Not sure how easy it'd be to enforce, but at the very least it seems <i>sleazy</i>.
Unless I am misunderstanding this <a href="http://bit.ly/c4NFgO" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/c4NFgO</a> it appears that this article misrepresents the changes in a couple of important ways:<p>1) Facebook says this is opt-in:
<i>Opt-in to new connections: When you next visit your profile page on Facebook, you'll see a box appear that recommends Pages based on the interests and affiliations you'd previously added to your profile. You can then either connect to all these Pages—by clicking "Link All to My Profile"—or choose specific Pages. You can opt to only connect to some of those Pages by going to "Choose Pages Individually" and checking or unchecking specific Pages. Once you make your choice, any text you'd previously had for the current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile will be replaced by links to these Pages. If you would still like to express yourself with free-form text, you can still use the "Bio" section of your profile. You also can also use features and applications like Notes, status updates or Photos to share more about yourself.</i><p>They reiterate this further down the page: <i>"If you don't want to show up on those Pages, simply disconnect from them by clicking the "Unlike" link in the bottom left column of the Page. You always decide what connections to make."</i><p>2) If you choose to opt-in you can control whether your friends see the connection on your profile by using the privacy settings.<p>So, it is opt-in, there is a simple way to remove yourself if you change your mind, you can control the visibility on your own profile, and if you don't want to faff around with the connections, you can just list this stuff as text in some of the available text only fields.<p>What is the issue?
"As Facebook's privacy policy promised, 'No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings'."<p>This is STILL true, and it's publicly known how to maintain privacy. You can keep all your information private to everyone who isn't a friend, and you get to control exactly who your friends are.<p>If you become a "Fan" of something or post on someone's comment/Wall, you're sharing some of your information with that page. No shit it's public. Why is a misunderstanding/lack of education about Facebooks policies equivalent to that site being sneaky and/or evil?