A friend posted within Facebook about how we should all read the article "Facebook privacy" on the Library at the End of Time
My first thought is if Facebook worries you, what do you think about Google (and I'm well aware of who pays for this blog)?
This seems to be the new internet business model (which I would credit my friend, but he's the one who will later be revealed as very privacy conscious):
1. figure out what kind of data is valuable to data mine
2. figure out a free service that people will want to use that collects said data unobtrusively
3. sell the data after you mined enough for it to be valuable (or earlier since a lot of people do not understand statistics well enough)
There's a lot of new business books out there these days about how to monetize "free". The thing about free is that someone always pays for it. You are reading this content for free and I can afford to give out a few thoughts for free, but I still need a day job to pay for this leisure time and my thinking and opinions will be influnced by that. But what's more important to focus on is blogger.com or facebook.com and not my little blog.
A site that has massive numbers of users like Facebook requires massive hardware and someone has to figure out how to pay for that. I'm not justifying it -- I'm saying that's the thinking you need to go through to sniff out privacy concerns. And you may not find them or you may not find them yet. The price of freedom and free is vigilance.
Although lost privacy worries me, I don't think any of it is malicious. I think the big problem of evil is that its usually done by those thinking they are doing good (if you're familiar, see my omelet poem). Frankly, I'm undecided on whether the new world of lost privacy is all together bad, but weighing the pros and cons consciously should be essential to any societal shift. Anyway, part of the motivation of Facebook aside from profit is to improve data quality. Although Facebook does so much better at targeted advertising then something like TV, the data really isn't as good as it could be and some want to improve it.
There's also an interesting study that shows the majority of people on a social network do not interact with people outside the social circles they would interact with in the physical world. This is relevant to those who say just dropping off Facebook completely is not an option. Sure social networking makes it all easier, but like with most luxuries we don't use it the way you would expect. They said in the 1950s that housework would take up less of our lives because there were now all these new efficiencies from washing machines, vacuums, dish washers and the like. But instead we found ways to keep the house cleaner, bought more things to clean, and spend about the same amount of time at it. I think the same may be true of social networks: we are not using it to expand the network or spend less time maintaining it, we are merely diving into the details a little more and spending about the same amount of time on it.
I'm speaking of course about the majority of people and not fringe groups like those that are called "addicts" (which seems to be the initial response for many who then calm down after their first exposure).
I have a friend who does not do any online social networking. He has a Facebook account but it's with a pseudonym and there's no identifying information on it. So he keeps in touch with what's going on but doesn't share anything. He does his networking the old fashioned way. I think if you did the same you might end up giving up a certain amount of yourself merely based on Google searches which reveal more about you than any normal Facebook status update (he actually gets around that but it requires vigilance and skill).
So what I think about vacuums, dishwashers, and Facebook is that we always give up a little something, but we seem to do our best to bring it back to the status quo, somewhere where the familiarity brings a feeling of safety. And this I think is what you are up against when you want to warn people of the dangers within: they've naturally brought this new thing into a safe spot in their lives.
And Facebook? They were sold to a parent company long ago and parent companies do not take in little orphans to shelter and protect them. Parent companies want to very quickly raise the children up so they can go out into the world and have a real job making profit. And Facebook costs a lot to run because of the massive number of people who use the site. And just as most parents get worried about you not reaching your potential, the parent company is always going to push the child to make the most profit (parent: "what? you have an advanced degree and you're working in retail?").
But I do not say these things to say "this is how it is" and "the battle is over". Instead it is merely: know what you are dealing with (both regarding Facebook itself and the average Facebook user) and know what you are looking for.
