Facebook's TOS are completely one sided.
The TOS (Terms of Service) (sec 2.1) states that not only do they own your data but if you don't keep it up to date and accurate they can terminate your account (sec 4.6) Essentially Zuckerfuck thinks of all you as his unpaid facebook employees.
Facbook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behaviour.
Zuckerfuck is definitley an unethical fuckhead. According to BusinessInsider.com he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. This albeit unproven raises some red flags as we saw a $65M settlement related to a lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for facebook.
FB wants to share your data with everyone.
Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of FB's privacy changes last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ...
Facebook is a bully.
When Pete Warden demonstrated how bait and switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Then immediately after FB followed suit and announced the Open API and the new "social default" Motive: hide what information is public from users.
Even your private data is shared with applications
At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem. FAIL: If I want your data all I have to do is write a good FB application.
Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted
They fuck up alot when it comes to your privacy, last year during the major privacy overhaul EVERYONE's profile became public, imagine your trying to lay low and stay away from your psychopath abusive ex husband, all of a sudden your profile becomes public he looks you up and finds out where your living and who your hanging out with now... scared yet? We're just getting started just this week you may have noticed fb chat was down, here's why "For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the 'preview my profile' feature of Facebook privacy settings," Facebook said in a statement.
Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account
It's one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had enough, it's pretty tricky to completely delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted" their account.
Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web
The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.
The Facebook application itself sucks
Between all the stupid apps like mafia wars and farmville the application itself is complete shit, it often fails to load pictures, suggests friends you don't even know, you can't even customize your profile, sure you can move things around, but remember myspace? you can edit full html so you can do whatever you want with you profile, facebook just keeps stealing more social network ideas, just recently they incorporated the @yourfriend just like twitter, I use to hate on twitter but now I realize it's a lot more useful than fbook, create your own blog get a twitter account, keep your friends updated on the things you want.
1 comment:
Dan is the man with the plan. Intelligent conversation about important topics the average person has no idea about. I also loved the over sized mic, which gave this video a radio announcer type of feel. Well done.
p.s. Dan don't get worked up over people's comments, there are too many douchbags on the net with troll syndrome to deal with.
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