Facebook wants to own you:

The pattern is clear. First you are lured into thinking that your experience at Facebook is largely confined to friends - the dozen or so people that you share information with that you wouldn't want everybody to know.

But over the years, there have been various "Oops!" episodes where Facebook - "Golly, we messed up somehow!" - exposed what you were doing, or where you happened to be, or where you lived, or other stuff. It's like letting the world into your home to peek through your wallet and filing cabinets, rummage through your closet, and so forth.

The latest from Facebook is that when you identify somebody in a picture, it will use facial recognition technology to build up a profile for that person. And you can't turn it off.* So not only does Facebook have records of your activities, it is building records of your - and your friends' - physical make up.

The corporate culture at Facebook is obvious. It's to provide a service, but also to harvest as much information about you, and your contacts, as possible. The repeated instances of privacy intrusions (aka "violations") isn't happening by mistake. It's policy.

* You can turn off a "suggestion" feature, and that's being incorrectly reported - even in various tech blogs - as if no facial recognition is taking place. But it appears that Facebook will continue to build a database of faces-people independent of the "suggestions" status. The basic problem is that nobody really knows what's happening at Facebook on this issue. There hasn't been a clear declaration of what they are doing, and so far what they are saying is highly elliptical, which isn't particularly reassuring.


posted by Quiddity at 6/08/2011 11:44:00 PM