Skip to main content

My Concerns about Facebook Have Nothing to do with Privacy

My concerns about Facebook have little to do with privacy.

I can see how some people would be put off by Facebook's callous attitude about their privacy, but I can't count myself amongst their number. I live pretty publicly anyway.

The recent kerfluffle has been almost entirely about privacy settings, but that's not where I fear Facebook. Instead, I'm afraid of the Like API announced at F8. I'm afraid of the walled garden creeping up around me. I'm afraid that I'll wake up one morning and someone will have taken my gloriously free Internet, and turned it into an AOL chatroom, unlinkable, unsearchable, unreachable by any means except the approved portal of Facebook.

I'm done with these gatekeepers like Zuckerberg (and Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch are right behind him)--each of them pursuing the dream of controlling what we consume.

I don't care that my browsing habits aren't private, I care that they aren't public in an open and searchable way!

Facebook drives a good amount of traffic my way, but no matter how many people "like" a status update of mine, it won't be searchable, or even reachable to someone not logged into Facebook. Facebook will allow all sorts of data in, but very little of it out in a searchable and linkable way. No, privacy is not my problem with Facebook.

I don't want to use Facebook for the same reasons I don't want to use the iPhone (the app store is a closed, proprietary, cynical construct, where the Gatekeepers bless or condemn as they see fit, for the benefit of us poor sods too feeble to choose for ourselves).

We are in the very earliest days of the new Internet ecosystem. The decisions we make now will have lasting effects on the structure of things to come. Facebook just feels like a big step backwards to me.

A step backwards towards centralized control.

A step away from the bazaar and towards the cathedral.

A step backwards towards our betters telling us what's good for us.

I want an internet that's open, searchable, linkable--not one that's governed, and certainly not one governed by the likes of Zuckerberg and Jobs.

Comments

  1. Educated RamblingsAugust 15, 2010 at 7:54 AM

    Your post are very interesting. I just recently joined blogging and throughly enjoy it better than facebook already! For the sheer value of reading something more educated or different than the mundane events of all my friends lifes!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You are going to get COVID-19. Now what?

In my best estimation, this is how we should address COVID-19 at this point:  1. You are going to get COVID-19. It's very likely endemic now. Breakthrough Delta infections carry the same viral load in the nasopharynx of the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. Resign yourself to this fact. You are going to get COVID-19. If not Delta, then whatever variant comes next due to antigenic drift.  2. There is no herd immunity. There is no eradicating this virus. "Zero COVID" is a fantasy. It's too widespread, too mutable, and too contagious. Eventually, this will join the other common coronaviruses in circulation (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1).  3. The vaccines shouldn't be considered vaccines. Consider them similar to seasonal flu shots. They are here to make sure that when you get COVID-19 (And let me reiterate: You are going to get COVID-19), you are far less likely to be hospitalized or die.  4. When enough people, vaxxed and unvaxxed, get COVID-19 (And let me reiterate: You are...
1 comment
Read more

Crowdsourcing Curation: The Social Graph as Gatekeeper

I've written before about the compromise we tacitly agree to when amateurs take over the roles formerly held by professionsals . The Internet promotes this takeover by lowering the cost of production and transmission to near zero for nearly every user, for everything from words (blogs) to pictures (Flickr) to video (YouTube). As Clay Shirky put it so well : As freedom to produce increases, average quality necessarily goes down. For example: Thanks to Flickr, we now have access to a mind-boggling array of beautiful pictures, but that's partly because we simply have access to a mind boggling array of pictures, period . Some of these, of course, are beautiful; but there are a lot more of Aunt Bettie's 43rd picture of a bundt cake than of an Annie Leibovitz Rolling Stone cover. It is at this point that many people interject: "This is the problem with the internet! It's full of crap!" Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, an...
4 comments
Read more

Intellectual Property and Deflation of the Knowledge Economy

[Update: This accidentally became a series of posts on a theme. Does Intellectual Property Law Foster Innovation? Where I question the efficacy of patent and copyright in a socially networked world. Intellectual Property and the Deflation of the Knowledge Economy - (this post) Where I toy with the idea that the Knowledge Economy may not turn out to be much of an economy, especially when it comes to Intellectual Property The Economic Reset Button - Where Jeff Jarvis asks Eric Schmidt whether or not this is a fundamental shift in the economic base Innovative Deflation - Where I ask, "Is the knowledge economy ripe for growth, or is it the means by which traditional economies are shrunk?" ] Friday night I was discussing the future of intellectual property law with some friends. My argument, in a nutshell: Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright) is heading for massive deflation in our lifetimes. We've seen it with the m...
4 comments
Read more