The highly-regarded Electronic Frontier Foundation writes about Facebook. An excerpt:
It’s clear why folks would associate this kind of deceptive practice with Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg told users back in 2007 that privacy controls are “the vector around which Facebook operates,” by January 2010 he had changed his tune, saying that he wouldn’t include privacy controls if he were to restart Facebook from scratch. And just a few days ago, a New York Times reporter quoted a Facebook employee as saying Zuckerberg “doesn’t believe in privacy”.
Zuckerberg is Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
So that you understand — Facebook’s business plan is to take the information you put on their site — all those likes, your name, age, schools, jobs, photos, friends — and sell it to advertisers. And they make it difficult to prevent this. Further, any application you link to through Facebook may have access to all your personal data as well.
If you don’t care, fine. If you do care . . .
I won’t use any apps on FB for this reason, and I try (try that is) to limit the personal info I disclose there. I saw somewhere, maybe here, that Google engineers are leaving FB in large numbers.
FB isn’t something I need, but it has been a nice way to easily keep in touch with friends around the country, and across time.
I liked the EFF bit about what the new “Connections” changes mean:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/things-you-need-know-about-facebook
It just keeps getting worse, eh?