Mama Needs a Moment

Facebook doesn't love you...that way.

Privacy rapists? Probably. But I'm not going anywhere.

There's a symphony of caterwauling going on of late about Facebook's ongoing plundering of demographic data for what I'm guessing must be rather lucrative data mining and advertising contracts. My initial reaction was surprise...not surprise that they're doing it– they've been doing it all along (or did you think it was just a really REALLY lucky guess that when you visited Facebook you'd get ads that said things like "Deep Discounts Only for 39-year-old Women!" or "33 and Single?!")–but that anyone is surprised.

There are a couple of issues here. The first and most obvious is privacy. Internet privacy, almost a contradiction in terms at this point, is determined by how low we keep our own profile–literally. The more you share, the less you should be surprised when it's "outed" by sites like Spokeo, an aggregator that's creating quite a flap lately because of its invasive-feeling summaries about us–which incorporate everything from addresses to approximate income and credit scores.

However, Spokeo isn't the first, not by a long shot, and certainly won't be the last. Most of the info Spokeo's compiling is readily available through search engines like Google and Bing. The difference is that it's more focused (though hardly more precise;  it was startlingly inaccurate in the tests I performed on myself and a few of my friends). Somehow seeing all one's data presented at once–like a rather sensitive personnel file complete with photos, links and financial records–after entering just a name, is disconcerting.

Like Spokey, Facebook is a business, and like any business it wants to grow, which in turn requires capital. How to monetize their offering has been a priority ever since they started taking off, and using demographic information is the most obvious path they could have pursued. Of course they're going to want to traffic your information...it's their only commodity.

The other issue is entitlement. The indignation some Facebook users are expressing ("If this keeps up, I am OUTTA HERE!") suggests users feel they were deceived or defrauded, as if there were a breach of trust. This may well be the case, but I'd argue that trust was misplaced right off the blocks.

While I understand being displeased with new, previously undisclosed practices that have us by default, wholly involuntarily denuding ourselves–even highly identifying, and perhaps even compromising, information–to third-party sites we may not be, ahem, "in a relationship" with...I also think we are partially to blame for a) posting way too much, and way too revealing, information online in the first place; and b) believing Facebook is going to behave like a trusted friend rather than an outside-funded social networking site for which we pay absolutely nothing to use–and with ever-increasing frequency.

We should get one thing clear: Facebook doesn't owe you a goddamned thing. Facebook isn't some kind of celestial Internetz "right" in a cosmic meritocracy. What did you, or any of us, do to "earn" our constantly-accessible (ample hiccups aside) platform for blogs, thoughts, and friendships (new, old, or hypothetical)? This no-cost hub that so many of us use daily–whether sparingly or copiously–to blather, bemoan, spam, self-promote, champion, persuade, edify, request information, declare, glean opinions, decry, boast, apologize, confuse, thank, solicit employment, or informally survey one another...from nearly any medium (via email, SMS, iPhone/Blackberry)--this is free, remember? Yet someone made a (free!) application for you to use on your iPhone, and someone is changing things, writing code, and making updates (plenty of which may be highly invasive and objectionable).  Storage space is required for your video clips of little Ashton spitting out peach puree, and for photo albums–posted by millions of users!– which appear (so far) to be retained indefinitely. Could there be a better solution than Facebook? Probably. But, so far, there isn't.

And what was that other thing? Oh, yeah. It's...free.

It's also a forum which, if you care to learn about it, can be administered rather strictly (drastically limiting access to even just a mere handful of people if you so desire) or you can leave it alone and let it pass along all your vitals to anyone who will pay for it; it's up to you. But at the end of the day, it can't tell anyone any stories that you didn't reveal in the first place.

I won't be leaving Facebook anytime soon; buggy and unscrupulous? Yeah, probably. But it's too widely adopted–nothing else out there has its sweep. Sometimes I use Facebook passionately, and other times I ignore it for weeks. But I've never reviled it for being what it is: a business, surfing slippery slopes, and sniffing out ways it can make money from what would otherwise be a losing proposition.