Surely you had to know that posting all that personal information online would eventually lead to its confiscation. Information is knowledge; knowledge is power; power is valuable, marketable and highly lucrative.
I am admittedly and hopelessly backward on this social media stuff. I have a Facebook page but it serves as a repository for photo albums of motorcycle trips down the Pacific coast and the Baja peninsula. I haven't updated it in years and tend to forget it exists.
My daughters, however, play their lives out on Facebook and Instagram, etc. I only go there when they give me a reason to visit because I simply don't want to know that much about their lives and how they lead them. It's voyeuristically BORING.
Now Facebook has announced its community of users will no longer have a say in how their information is used. The social networking site recently posted a gaggle of policy changes and invited users to vote on them. Nine in ten who did vote opposed the changes but less than 1% of Facebook users bothered to vote and the company requires a 30% threshold to be binding.
The company said it would adopt the changes despite the opposition. Among the changes is taking away Facebook users' rights to vote on future changes.
Facebook said it plans to give users other ways to weigh in on policy changes, such as an ''Ask the Chief Privacy Officer'' question-and-answer forum on its website.
The company also plans to ease restrictions on who can message you on Facebook and it aims to share information with its affiliates, including the popular photo-sharing service Instagram.
Oh well, oh dear. Yet the reality is, and Facebook knows it, that its users won't flee from intrusions on their privacy. They won't even notice. They don't really care.
With Smart Meters, tv companies watching you, cameras all over the place and now black boxes being installed in your vehicle..sales people won't be telling you unless you ask, along with GPS watching your every move the question needs to be asked.."What is the difference between that and communism?"
ReplyDeleteWell I don't know about communism, in particular, but all these developments you list certainly are suggestive of a disturbing shift to authoritarianism and a rapid decline in democratic freedoms. We are observed, tracked and monitored seemingly at every turn. Many Victoria police cruisers have cameras that record licence-plate numbers in traffic. They're supposed to identify stolen vehicles, suspended drivers and so on. But the Victoria police chief is resisting demands to purge the data of non-suspect drivers just in case they might be helpful later. Is that suggestive of a police state? Yes.
ReplyDeleteFacebook, and other 'social' products, are possibly a part of, I think, the largest surveillance project in history.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
I don't put anything on facebook I don't want others to see. Everything I post is public.
ReplyDeleteI mainly use facebook to get news, I like pages of relevant subjects to me, and they tend to share the sort of news articles I'm interested in.
Nice Blog Post !
ReplyDelete