Tuesday, July 03, 2012

"Aren't You On Teh Facebook?"

No.



At least, I have deleted my account and tried to purge as much personal info as possible.

Why?

Because I don't trust those bastards. And you shouldn't either.

The straw that broke the camel's back was the fact they were mining other programs and data sources for additional information.

I logged into the (undeletable) Facebook app on my Android phone once and went to do a status update.
One of the helpful daemons sent a suggestion that I should "friend" a particular person...
Now, normally, I don't mind that they do data mining on info I have already given them, and usually they just look for dovetailing friends- friends with one or two common associations (other friends, schools, workplaces etc)
However- it suggested that I friend a particular person - someone I know, but one with which I have no common bonds or friends. The only place that the suggestion could have come from was if FB went rifling through my recent Outlook inbox and found an email from that  person.
I had received an email (a forwarded Intarweb meme) from this person the previous week and flagged it for a follow-up.

If Facebook is going out and digging through all my personal data, the permission for such is probably buried down in their EULA, and they will just shrug their virtual shoulders and say "you said we could - you clicked the 'I agree' button, chump."
And I don't care how pure their motives might be, we have absolutely no control over what FB does with the data they might find in our outboxes, inboxes, or your cookies, or your other programs (Quicken? TurboTax?)

I say fuck 'em.

I don't need to 'Like' anyone or anything to survive.
If someone really needs to get in touch with me, there are plenty of other ways to do that.

Now getting rid of FB is a monumental two-week pain in the ass. It involves stepping through some convoluted hoops, sending notifications and then not touching your FB account (or anything that uses FB as a login vehicle) for two weeks. Accidently log in once during the two week cool-off period and you have to start all over again.

I know lots of folks have FB accounts and limit the info they put out there for the world to see...
Unfortunately FB doesn't limit itself to the info you feed it...Its a hungry beast, and it consumes everything it can.


Don't trust free software or apps.

If they aren't selling you something, they are selling you (or your data).


TBG- ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE

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