Is this the new face of our favorite addiction? Or has it always been?
Here’s a disturbing new article from Mashable detailing Facebook‘s latest big innovation in controlling each and every aspect of our lives.
The central message of the article has been obvious from the start — WATCH. WHAT. YOU. POST. ONLINE. Maybe ORM really will be a precious resource over the next decade. Unfortunately for Facebook users like myself and most likely anyone who reads this blog, this also applies to your friends as well. Once it’s been “fed” to Facebook, it never comes out. That means pictures, notes, messages, posts — anything you or anyone you know uploads to their servers — are immediately at the discretion of whichever faceless, shadowy figures now run the social networking giant. What’s changed here is that, even if you deactivate or remove these items, Facebook’s new TOS is happy to remind you that what’s done is done. Kind of scary. Is it time for a change? Who is it up to? Injustices like human trafficking are one thing, but as we learned from the new facebook layout, nothing inspires a social movement like a redesign of a website — but even the voices of 2.6 million users fell on deaf ears. Facebook only grew in popularity… and continues to do so.
Now I’m no big city lawyer, but I imagine this change is going to be looked at very heavily throughout the blogosphere and hopefully the legal realm over the coming weeks, as there is definitely something fishy about all of this. Just because I carry a sign around that states that all who read it must shower me with gifts doesn’t mean they actually have to.
If it’s something that Facebook has to do, then fine, but if it’s suddenly okay for them to make money by selling an image of my friends, I think there are some people out there who’d like to get a little advance notice so they can take their business elsewhere. Friendster, you’re still cool, right? No? Well, don’t worry, at this rate, Facebook will be joining you soon. What a shame. I feel like XuQa was just getting settled into its own corner of the grave.
February 27th, 2009 at 11:53 am
“Now, I’m no big city lawyer, but” – Hilarious! I read into this after seeing a message from the Book about how they changed their privacy settings and feeling a bit Orwellian. I’m sure plenty of groups have already popped up about the topic but I want to see them reverse their policy, it’s wrong on so many levels.
Sure, part of their advertising platform relies on having valuable demo/psychographics that marketers chomp at the bit for but Mark Zuckerberg should have thought about that when he passed up a multi-billion dollar offer from Google a couple of years ago.