From CNN.com:
Facebook's latest modifications make it pretty clear that the company is eager to spread its brand even further across the Web -- and that's left some privacy advocates a little freaked out as they look at the vast amount of personal information that Facebook has on hand.
But Facebook, of course, maintains that this is all ultimately good for the Internet and everyone on it, and that it's in everyone's best interest to jump on board:A post Tuesday on the Facebook developer blog explains that the new "social plug-ins" are now implemented on over 100,000 sites, and that they work.
Social plug-ins were one of Facebook's big announcements at F8, the developer conference that the social network held last month.
They take its existing Facebook Connect product a few steps further by bringing users' Facebook friends lists to external sites and showing them their friends' activity. A news site, for example, could show which stories your Facebook contacts have been recommending and commenting on.
There is a fine line between social networking and social surveillance and FaceBook just crossed it. Sure, this is all voluntary on the part of the user, but the idea of knowing what my FaceBook friends are doing on the internet is just...creepy.
Beyond the "I didn't need to know that about my buddy" factor, most folks have a mix of family and friends on their lists, and where one's peers might find certain internet activities acceptable, the same might not be said for family and vice versa. What happens when a person forgets that they've enabled the social connect function when they comment on or "like" a site and then regret that action at the next family reunion? Uncle Bob the cattle rancher might not be impressed to learn that his nephew has been trolling vegan recipe sites...
Further still, I am not liking the idea of receiving tons of spam from various sites just because one of my FB friends visited there once, and you know that kind of marketing is a big part of where this is heading. I don't need a ton of e-mail from "CoolShoesForCoolChix.com" and none of my friends need e-mail from "ComicBookGeek.com" either. Enough is enough.
I like my privacy, thank you, and I will share no more of it with FaceBook.
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2 comments:
I was able to opt out of this "sharing" thing, but I think this is why my dad left Facebook.
Unbe-freakin-lievable! I was at cnn.com and discovered that my previous action of deactivating my account might NOT be a permanent deletion. On a hunch, I tried to log back in and sure enough, there's my stuff, just as I left it in January!
I followed the cnn.com instructions, went to the help center, (under "account") typed in "delete facebook" and found a link to permanently delete my account. In 14 days, it will (supposedly) be completely gone.
Sneaky bastards. You'd think "Deactivate" would be enough to get rid of an account.
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