Signed on to Facebook for about 10 days. More out of curiosity than anything else. Twitter has been working out quite well – and not surprisingly.
I mean, Twitter is a very simple thing. You post thoughts and hopefully link to some richer media somewhere.
It works… like you would expect.
But I digress.
I signed up for Facebook knowing full well how dodgy and sketchy Facebook is with peoples personal information. We have always known that Facebook is a data mining center for the folks who pay the execs at Facebook top dollar for every bit of minutia you put on your profile. It’s for sale. You’re for sale. And you can never really delete that information… ever. Never.
I knew that.
I also know that everything you put on Facebook (pictures, content, multimedia) belongs to Facebook forever. Your pictures? Theirs. Your life? Theirs. It is in the user agreement. You have no excuse if you are offended and do not understand this.
I get this.
What I was not ready for was the amount of spam mail that I got that seemed to fit in, puzzle like, and locked fit to every little detail of my personal profile.
What I discovered was: In my “interests” are on Facebook, I have; hiking, skiing, race car driving, helicopter piloting, ballet, etc etc…
And I was soon being buried on my e-mail with shills for hiking, skiing, race car driving and so on. You get the picture.
And I had my “privacy” settings locked down as hard as they could go.
So I should not be surprised that Facebook sells everything on you… and me.
But I was… a little.
But I left. After 10 days. And it’s OK.
Because tens of thousands of people are leaving Facebook daily. Some of these departures are affectionately referred to as suicide pacts – group departure from an online social network that is, oh so obviously… so… yesterday.
The online user base (and the folks at Facebook should pay attention to this) are pretty savvy.
And like old friends who turn out to be con artist scum balls… we eventually clue in.
I did.
And you can too.
Comments
One response to “Rites of Spring #14 – Facebook suicide run. Good bye.”
Hear you loud and clear. Every time I log on, I am on the verge to shut myself out of facebook for good. Will stay a little while longer out of curiosity though. Met a few folks ‘back from the days’ and enjoyed it. BUt now I see the interests to market the heck out of f.b. clashing with intense privacy concerns. It’s capitalism at its worst: The exploitation of the masses as private individuals. And they can not solve this oxymoron with all the billions of dollars waving at the stock market! Impossible to combine the demands of a public investor, and the private participants signing on to facebook.
Or is it? The simple solution of making every facebook participant automatically a shareholder and getting (however minute) percentages of the advertising revenue, would be the logical answer. After all, the members are real people and that’s what makes them so valuable for marketers. They are selling their right to privacy. The value of a regular, potentially boring dork has suddenly a numerical value attached. But selling shares on the stock market or actually really ‘sharing’ are two different worlds. If the owner Zuckerberg would be still the 23 year old geek, the image he tries to pull of in public, he had already thought of it and would implement it.
If Facebook wants to sell my age, race, gender, location, hobby, etc info for let’s say $1 per click to an Adult Diaper company I should earn e.g. $0.01 cent for it.
It’s bad enough that one day we may not be able to control our bowel movement. Another thing to let folks know who are interested in things like this. And if they pay to find us personally with our pants down, we should be compensated for the embarrassment.