It IS using you and if you aren't smart enough to figure that out then you're living in a bubble universe.
FB is an awful, monstrous growth on society. I'm sorry if this sounds like an over-reaction, but its pure, undiluted evil. Its reach is just way far too pervasive and the tracking on non-members is just plain illegal as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, people seem to have come to believe that society couldn't exist without it.
I'm (vainly probably) hoping that the flotation will, ultimately, be its downfall. Even existing toothless Regulation might scupper its share value enough to make it an obvious bubble investment -- and people might wake the fuck up and start to remember the real value of money, people and privacy again.
I can think of many things I'd apply that label to (Such as DHS, the republican party, ACTA), but applying that to a service that people voluntarily sign up and use is a bit absurd, don't you think?
This just in: Advertising companies track people. Film at 11.
It's possible to completely avoid facebook and their tracking with the most minimal of effort. I wonder when we're going to stop seeing these breathless "zOMG EVIL!!1" rants against commonly used services and stop diluting the meaning of the word "evil".
Showing you advertisements is not "evil". Using cookies is not "evil".
No, its not. Its what they are doing with your responses to those things that are potentially or actually evil. The fact it requires any response on my part, minimal or not, is absurd and unacceptable.
People reserve that type of speech for concentration camps or mass graves, not a social networking site where you can poke your friends. Please read up on some history and get some perspective
I meant the about section of this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Craiggybear Unless you mean simply that you prefer to be "anonymous", in which case you should probably delete your account and stop posting here. A profile is just a boundary drawn around a collection of data. Everything you post online in an unencrypted format can be fed into a sufficiently capable program that can infer that the real offline You made this post. It can base that inference on other data it has access to from other sites you've posted on by noticing similarities in writing style, content, etc. If you don't want boundaries to be drawn around your public output, don't make it public and start using encryption.
FB is an awful, monstrous growth on society. I'm sorry if this sounds like an over-reaction, but its pure, undiluted evil. Its reach is just way far too pervasive and the tracking on non-members is just plain illegal as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, people seem to have come to believe that society couldn't exist without it.
I'm (vainly probably) hoping that the flotation will, ultimately, be its downfall. Even existing toothless Regulation might scupper its share value enough to make it an obvious bubble investment -- and people might wake the fuck up and start to remember the real value of money, people and privacy again.