Mimeographs from the Future

To truly under­stand the devo­lu­tion of pri­vacy that drove my deci­sion to aban­don Face­book, you need only look at this post by Matt McK­eon, which leads in:

How­ever, Face­book hasn’t always man­aged its users’ data well. In the begin­ning, it restricted the vis­i­bil­ity of a user’s per­sonal infor­ma­tion to just their friends and their “net­work” (col­lege or school). Over the past cou­ple of years, the default pri­vacy set­tings for a Face­book user’s per­sonal infor­ma­tion have become more and more per­mis­sive. They’ve also changed how your per­sonal infor­ma­tion is clas­si­fied sev­eral times, some­times in a man­ner that has been con­fus­ing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook’s effort to cor­re­late, pub­lish, and mon­e­tize their social graph: a mas­sive data­base of enti­ties and links that cov­ers every­thing from where you live to the movies you like and the peo­ple you trust.

I was OK when Face­book only shared infor­ma­tion I shared with them, but the creep­ing inte­gra­tion of Face­book with every­thing else gives them “acci­den­tal access” to way more infor­ma­tion in aggre­gate. In some ways, they get more than Google does now, and that’s pretty scary to me. Just click on the graphic to under­stand how bad it’s got­ten. Event the ven­er­a­ble New York Times has got­ten into the act with an arti­cle enti­tled “Tell-All Gen­er­a­tion Learns to Keep Things Offline”.

Tagged: evil, facebook, privacy