Fear Facebook

I'm pushing close to the deadline tonight so I'll get straight on with it. I read a fascinating article by Tom Hodgkinson in the Guardian today, about the politics of the founders of every call centre's life force, Facebook. Now, I don't have a Facebook account, not because I ever wondered about it's politics, but because to me it always looked a bit, well, shit. It took over from MySpace before I even had time to get a MySpace going; and where MySpace seemed to be focussed on blogging, music and video, Facebook seems to revolve around blurry pictures of pissed-up twats in nightclubs and imaginary drinks. This article, however, produced one of those great moments when the nature and purpose of something so familiar is suddenly shown in a very different and unsettling light. It can be enjoyed in full here, but the most startling part for me was a rigorous run-through of Facebook's privacy policy, which you have to accept to be allowed into their gay little club. It turns out that:

Personal information that you put on Facebook is not guaranteed to be kept secure from unauthorised persons, and is in fact routinely passed on to other organisations, including U.S. government agencies.

Having just posted a hazy, possibly libellous statement on this here blog, and after reading the article about Facebook's shady, all-powerful neo-con backers, I'd like to remind you that just because I'm saying I learned it, doesn't mean I'm saying it's true. Facebook might genuinely be all about helping people to make new friends and improve their lives. It's not, but it might be. Some other surprises for you Facebookers out there: they will send you e-mails about your account even if you ask them not to; they'll look at your acccount, as well as any other stuff you put online in order to send you suitable adverts, whether you want them or not; they will tell you what your Facebook friends have been buying online, in order to try and make you do the same. It appears to basically exist to generate a pool of identifiable brand targets, a 60-million strong anonymous powerless product demographic. Fuck that. Try your local library instead; you won't make any friends, but you won't end up in Guantanamo Bay either.