Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook.<p>Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back end.
The problem with Facebook is and will always be this: when you signed up, you signed away your rights to privacy.<p>If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it.<p>If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free.<p>Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.
<i>It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while. And no one will be able to do it better than Facebook.</i><p>Well, Google already does it better, but Facebook might be able to catch up.
This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it.<p>Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.
I'm genuinely curious -- I've never been particularly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it seems like the author's main concern is better ad targeting (which I see as beneficial, although I may be in a minority).<p>What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?
RFID tags "implanted" in conference badges? The OP jumps on to this slippery slope argument and lands in big-brother-knows-my-physical-location land. Nowhere at f8 did Facebook announce any plans for stepping into the location-based services market, least of all with any specialized hardware the OP is so afraid of.
"Given pre-condition #2 (traffic), Facebook Like buttons are going to be everywhere. All of the top sites will have them, and most of the medium-sized sites will too."<p>Wrong. All the medium-sized sites will have it, and all the >= 2nd place large sites (bing, retailers that aren't amazon) will have it. All the top large site will have their own systems to push.
Like most monocultures operating on 20th century logic, FB will fail. I'm not saying they won't make a ton of money in the process (ala MS) but in the end, the system will innovate around and past them (as it is already doing).<p>The 21st century is all about UX, i.e. power to the people. Entities who do not recognize this will not thrive in the long-term.
I think if Facebook seriously wants to gain trust, they must offer the ability to curate your personal data. Not just FUTURE data -- All of your data. Of course, they would be giving up some serious leverage that they have right now in taking <i>control</i> of the internet.<p>I have been seriously questioning my presence on Facebook for some time now, the only thing holding me back is that a large portion of my distant friends and relatives are on Facebook, and they use it as a primary method of contact. I was an early adopter of Facebook, the amount of data they have on me over the years -- especially during my stupid years at University, scares me. When will this be used against me? Furthermore, HOW it can be used against me scares me most.
There are three countervailing forces: the residual desire for privacy, the availability of cloud resources, and the ubiquity of personal mobile computing.<p>There are still plenty of people who use Facebook and even the Internet as little as possible. They can do so because there are other communication channels available and because networks other than the ones online still matter as much or more than their online networks.<p>The cloud and mobile computing will allow some people to opt-out of social networks, providing ecological niches for competitor networks to grow. Some youth will aways find it awkward to be on the same social network as their parents. New social networks will arise and competition will keep these networks in check.
The likes also feed into the advertising system, which may be obvious but I didn't read that connection. With the likes being so ubiquitous it's quite possible, given their broad reach, that Facebook will be able build a better model of your propensities than Google.
"It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while."<p>I can not believe that Google & other ad networks have not been doing this for years already. (That's why they are networks).
What I wonder about Facebook is the effects of sharing information with people you don't <i>really</i> want to share information with. For instance, the older generations are all signing up for Facebook now; it's an phenomenon for 'all the family.' Therein lies its problem: teenagers, tweenagers, don't want the grown-ups to know everything about their social lives. It starts to get awkward.<p>I predict some migration of young people to newer, trendier social networks because of this issue.
This person did not answer their own question.<p>There have been a bunch of posts about "Company X will know too much about me, . . . "<p>No one ever says WHY that scares the shit out of them.