Facebook is a privacy nightmare. As you are sitting at home in your pajamas chatting with your friends, posting pictures, and playing your facebook games, facebook is watching. Facebook is always watching. Everything you type, like, or post is saved by facebook. You can hide and restrict access to pictures and posts from others, but you cannot hide them from facebook. You should not feel safe by taking advantage of the privacy options offered by facebook. They provide only a facade of privacy. Facebook can and does read your posts and look at your pictures. It knows who your friends are and what you like and don't like. It knows everything you have ever posted or clicked. If you posted your age and occupation, facebook knows it. If you announced your engagement or told your friends that you just got married, you also told facebook. Just had a new child? If you tell your friends on facebook, you have told facebook. If you click on a "Like Carrot Top" ad, (I don't know why anyone would), facebook knows it. If you click it or post it, Facebook knows it. That was far more information than I cared to share. It is one thing to tell your friends that you lost 20 pounds. It is another thing to tell Mark Zuckerberg.
The last straw for me was the discovery that facebook follows you after you leave the site. Indeed, it stalks it members as they browse the net. Even when you are not logged into facebook it is tracking you.With the advent of supercookies a whole new front has opened up in internet privacy. It has long been common knowledge that web sites place trackers, known as "cookies" on the computers of people who visit their sites. Many sites, even reputable sites such as the New York Times, will not let you view their page unless you allow them to put a cookie in your computer. The cookie allows them to keep track of you every time you log into their site. When you leave the site, the cookie becomes dormant, just another piece of clutter in your computer. The cookie steps down and takes it place alongside all the other cookies in your computer until the next time you visit the site. They are the internet's version of caller ID. Supercookies however never step down. They never sleep. They follow you from site to site, page to page, and document to document. They allow the people who put them in your computer to recognize your computer when you log on to the web. It also lets them know what you have searched for, what you have looked at, and how long you have looked at it. It is as if whoever placed the supercookie in your computer is sitting next to you when you are on the web. Facebook uses supercookies to track its users. Worse, you can block and easily delete cookies. You are lucky if you can even find supercookies in your computer. Finding and deleting supercookies is well beyond the ability of the casual computer user. They are built to burrow into your computer and hide.
The information facebook collects, and has collected, is a gold mine. Zuckerberg has become fabulously rich selling that information. It is estimated that there are 750 million facebook users Facebook knows the name of all of them. For the most part, it also knows what they look like, where they work, where they live, their marital status, and whether they have children. If you visit a web page with a facebook share widget, facebook knows you were there. Through the "like" button, facebook also knows what they like, from cars and clothes to music and politics. If you clicked it or posted it, facebook knows it. By compiling the information shared on the site and selling that information, Facebook is an advertiser's wet dream. Do you like Dodge?
Do you watch Law and Order? Do you like to fish? Do you like Barack
Obama? If you clicked it, facebook knows it. That is why if you announce to your friends that you will be taking a vacation you will start getting advertisement on your page from travel agencies and hotels. It may be legal but it is reprehensible to delude people into thinking that what they are sharing is limited to their friends.
The new options provided by facebook in the face of the growing concern over privacy on the site, such as those that allow you to control who can view your posts and pictures are misleading. They only protect you from certain people viewing your site, not facebook. And that nifty feature that allows you to tag yourself and friends in pictures has, according to a study done by Carnagie Melon University, made facebook "a world wide photo database." The privacy tools offered by facebook are deceptive. They might be useful in keeping information you post out of public view, but they do not protect you from facebook. Even if you click the "only me" option, facebook will still peep and record. The information you share with your friends on your page is not enough for facebook. They want more. They want everything.
Having learned that, I decided to shave my profile down to the nubs: just my name, a single photo, and an email address. I did that not just to allow people to find me, but also to allow me to keep in touch with my facebook friends (if you can call them that). I thought I was safe from facebook's prying. I was wrong. Facebook was stalking me. The only way I could be free from Zuckerberg's smiling face and incessant peeping was to cancel my account, and so I did. I went over the wall and am alone online for the first time in a long time. Not only did I take a step to protect my privacy, I found that I had more hours in a day than I thought I had. I also in my own small way stuck it to the Man.
Facebook is already under pressure over its privacy policies. Among other things they are being pressured to inform users that their data is being mined and that they are being followed. Progress is slow. Facebook is understandably reluctant to give up such a lucrative marketing tool. I advise anyone who is skeptical of my remarks to google facebook privacy issues and see for themselves. (Just be careful. Google is also under fire for its privacy policies.)You will soon learn that I am not paranoid or hyperventilating. Facebook is in court all over the place. Sitting on the couch late at night in your pajamas, you might think you are having a private chat and sharing photos with your friends. You are not. Facebook is sitting right there watching and recording everything you type and post in order to sell it.You say that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy online. You
are correct. But there is a difference between being watched and being
followed. You might tolerate JC Penny watching you while you are in the store but you would not allow them to follow you home and rummage through your closet. You should not allow facebook to follow you and rummage through your computer. I won't.
There are reasons we draw the blinds on our windows, even if we are just watching TV or reading a book. We expect not to be spied on or followed. There are laws against it. As of now, those laws do not apply to the Internet. Fortunately, there is an increasing awareness of the threat the Internet and companies like facebook pose to privacy. I chose not to wait for Congress to protect my privacy from Mark Zuckerberg. I just deleted my account. There is a downside I have to admit. Without Facebook how can I let all my friends know how my colonoscopy turned out? On the upside I finished that book on my night stand in record time.
