Facebook owns you

[monster]

Originally Posted by monster

peeps, it's a free thing.......

......so just walk away if you don't like it.

[BigV]

Young Zuckerberg musing over breakfast:

[Perry Winkle]

Puts me in mind of something I heard a while back. Something along the lines of "If you aren't paying you aren't the customer. You are the product."

It was much more poetic where I first read it.

[classicman]

Yeh, that's been all over FB when people complain about the changes.

As an aside, I recently found Tom from Myspace on FB. Kinda funny.
Here is his page

[gvidas]

I don't think being a "product" rather than a "customer" makes it less legitimate to be concerned about what happens to you. If anything, it should make it more important. The transaction between a business and its customer is supposed to be mutually beneficial, whereas the transaction between a business and its product is almost by definition one-sided. But exploitation is exploitation. Just because they were never doing anything other than profiting from you doesn't mean you should be less concerned about it.

[chrisinhouston]

I completely quit FB last Thursday as they rolled out all of those new features to make my life more complete. I quit for a variety of reasons

1. Found myself just wasting time reading about all of the mundane things my friends were doing.
2 Realized that over 1/2 of my FB friends were complete morons from high school or college that I never liked back then and most had completely opposing views on politics and religion and way to vocal in those areas.
3. Have never had any use for Farmville or any other games which most of the moron friend base uses.
4. Have little interest in college football which many of my friend felt compelled to post about all day on Saturday and Sunday.
5. I had blocked more then half of the FB friends on my list since they kept sending me posts and shit like "hearts" or Jesus quotes that I didn't want.
6. Noticed that FB was screening the FB friends I had not blocked and was mainly posting the stream from only certain friends, they were in essence screening or managing my feed with no guidance from me.

Now, here is what really got me to quit. I read some tech blogs and have a few friends (real ones) out in California who are software programers and engineers, etc. Here is what I learned:

Facebook announced major changes designed to "steamline" the social networking experience but also create a whole new way for advertisers to market to consumers, i.e Facebook members. One of the ways they are going to accomplish this is through so called frictionless apps that allow websites to write apps whereby all activity on their pages can be shared automatically to a user's Facebook profile. The aim is to make sharing more convenient, so that Facebook members can more easily browse what their friends are interested in and start conversations about common interests and activities.

The thing no one seems to be mentioning is that they do this by inserting cookies into your browser and it's history. That isn't unusual at all but normally cookies are designed to only communicate with the creator, in this case Facebook when you are logged in and not communicate any information when you physically log out of the program. Well these cookies are different and they keep reporting to Facebook even if you log out completely from Facebook! What websites are you visiting and do the websites or products have a Facebook "like" link on them. The idea is that they can then use that information in marketing services or products or sell the information to others. And there is only one way for a person to stop these cookies from working in the background, you have to go into your browser settings and delete them after each visit to your Facebook account and log out, or they will just go on reporting and recording information. Not only information like retail websites and music sites you visit. They record everything like what news articles you read or general research. For instance if you go research a type of cancer because a friend was diagnosed and you are curious about it, it gets reported. May be alarmist but an insurance company would love to buy up information like that. They can also track what news you read or what political websites you might visit.

There are also serious implications if you are using Facebook from a public terminal as millions of world wide users do. If you log in on a public terminal and then hit 'log out', you are still leaving behind fingerprints of having been logged in. These fingerprints remain (in the form of cookies) until somebody explicitly deletes all the Facebook cookies for that browser. Associating an account ID with a real name is easy - as the same ID is used to identify your profile.

Facebook knows every account that has accessed Facebook from every browser and is using that information to suggest friends, services or other apps. As an example if a family had 4 members who share a computer and all 4 are FB members but none of them are FB friends they will all slowly start getting suggestions to "friend" the other family members because the software algorithm identifies all 4 as using the same computer even when logged out of their accounts.

So, after I deleted my FB account I went into my cookies folder and deleted every cookie related to FB and also a whole slew of other ones from various sites as general cleanup.

Now, that being said in regards to FB, I do have a Google+ account and am dabbling over there with the whole circle thing and am generally much more pleased. Does Google+ track every minute detail? From what my friends in Silicon Valley are saying not as much as FB and they track in a different way, more through the Google search engine and other Google products.

I also found that many professional photographers are at Google+ and it is growing rapidly, on a time line compared to FB G+ is growing in registered users much faster then FB did so it will be interesting to see where G+ goes.

[Undertoad]

6. Noticed that FB was screening the FB friends I had not blocked and was mainly posting the stream from only certain friends, they were in essence screening or managing my feed with no guidance from me.

This is true. There's a setting somewhere that defaults to show you only the friends with whom you have recently interacted. You have to go in and set it to "all".

I imagine this was set up so that one's feed wouldn't be filled with items from people one doesn't really care about.

Now the feed will be filled with items you don't care about from people you do care about, which is weird.

My worry is that developers are now focusing on FB as a platform, so increasingly, there will be things you can't even do without it.

When Spotify came to the US I immediately fell in love with it as a way of playing music and finding new music. Well last week Spotify announced that you can't use it if you don't have a Facebook account. Of course this is the result of back room deals and accumulating power against the media companies. But who wasn't consulted: the users, who don't want it and who don't necessarily get anything out of it.

You don't have to actually post to FB with your Spotify, but the default behavior is that it posts every song you listen to to your feed. I do not want to annoy my friends with that kind of detail. I try to post no more than one item every day or two.

The benefit for FB is that there are "play" buttons in FB which let people play the music that you've shared. Well I ran my college radio station back in the day, and my radio show was called "Songs you like but have never heard before", specializing in finding little-heard awesome music. But I don't want to share all my songs!! So who does this appeal to, beyond FB trying to be everything for everybody?

I wonder if the entire appeal is to the under-40s who approach this all differently. All I can think is, Myspace became popular partly for its easy music integration, and fell out of favor *permanently* when it became annoying. Now FB has done its music integration, and became a little more annoying, on the same day.

[glatt]

I'd rather be on Google+, but only about 5% of my friends are over there, and they don't post anything because everyone is still on Facebook. It's where the activity is. Although to be honest, the activity has really died down over the last year or so. I think even though people are spending more time on FB, they are using it to communicate less and less.

[chrisinhouston]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Well I ran my college radio station back in the day,

Funny, I had my first radio job at WRAS in Atlanta, owned by Georgia State University, they played what was referred to as "progressive" back in the mid 70's. I started with the 2am-6am shift which was where every beginning disk jockey started. It's no wonder my grades were bad as I fell asleep in most of my classes.

Back to FB, I read one commentary that reminded readers that Internet conglomerates often end up failing or downsizing when they try to be everything to everybody and don't succeed and cited AOL and Microsoft as examples. The reality is that with every new incarnation there is something else around the corner from someone else.

[BigV]

http://nikcub.appspot.com/logging-ou...-is-not-enough

[ZenGum]

I read one commentary that reminded readers that Internet conglomerates often end up failing or downsizing when they try to be everything to everybody and don't succeed and cited AOL and Microsoft as examples.

Eh? I wish I could fail as hard as Microsoft did.

[Gravdigr]

I just came from Facebook. It wants me to friend 1,691 people. It took almost fifteen minutes to list them.

I know 4 of these people. Very vaguely.

[glatt]

Here's one from the small world department. Facebook suggests a person I don't know who is mutual friends with my cousin's husband and Undertoad.

[infinite monkey]

I haven't logged into Bacefook since I started reading about all this. I'm sure i'm missing some good stuff but this sounds like a nightmare and, well, fuckit.

[footfootfoot]

Truly "unfacebook" yourself here:
http://suicidemachine.org/