A couple of months ago the Austrian law student Max Schrems asked Facebook to send him all their data stored about him.
All Europeans have a right to do this because Facebook is based in the EU in Dublin, Ireland.
It took a while and then Facebook sent Max a CD with 1222 PDF files.
What does Facebook do with all this data? It makes money from it, selling on your data, your likes, dislikes, your ‘friends’ and your privacy. Just like Google.
Did you think of Facebook as an altruistic organisation?. Set up by students, with questionable social skills, and an ongoing legal battle between founders, Facebook is devoted to $$. Why else is it playing with billions of dollars.
Check out this YouTube video.
As with Microsoft and Google, ask yourself if using it is good for the world as well as for you. If its an open system its great. If its a closed system its like a mega-cult which isn’t good. They never are.
While it would be nice for facebook to be our friend (!) that is a naive wish. Zuckerberg isn’t in it for the fame. Neither was Steve Jobs, whose iPhones can trace where people are. So, consumers, we have to make choices, and if yours is to be cool and have an iPhone, know the risks. And stop hoping facebook will be your friend.
There is strange similarity with George Orwell’s satirical 1984 and the ‘telescreens’ idea. People were spied on by television-like devices. The odd thing now is that people sit in front of screens and voluntarily input information into one company’s massive database without thinking about what they are doing.
See http://www.itleadership.org/content/creating-iphone-killer
and http://www.itleadership.org/content/george-orwell-1984-more-right-we-thought for more.