Oppugn.us

For a couple weeks now, the usual sources of nerd news have been gushing like a BP disaster with stories concerning Facebook and its various alleged infractions against users' privacy.

While I'd like to think that none of that crap applies to me, I'd be remiss to overlook some interesting and rarely discussed issues around this whole social networking privacy snafu in the first place.

You see, I don't use Facebook.

I have never used Facebook, and I will never use Facebook.

I don't even need to use Facebook, since some of the people I know are already using it for me:

• They post photos of me on Facebook
• They post photos of my family members on Facebook
• They tag these photos with full names, make comments, and have discussions on them

I can't say that I appreciate this at all. In fact, it is starting to piss me off.

My wife and I have a longstanding agreement that our children shall not have their likenesses posted to the 'net in any form until they're actually old enough to use the service they wish for that purpose themselves. (Age 13 for Facebook at present)

It's unfortunate that some people I know think along the lines that because it's Facebook, 'it must be okay, and I'll just post these photos without asking, because hey, doesn't everyone use it anyway?'

What's worse, Facebook's Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities contain nothing I could find that is specifically related to this situation.

The "Protecting Other People's Rights" section of their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities is unhelpful, and seems to be mainly concerned with IP and not stepping on the toes of other corporations.

Upon reading some of the sections, it actually seems to read something along the lines of 'Giving a shit about the individual is not our focus, let's go shopping!'.

As a service that hinges around loads of people sharing their personal details, Facebook sure has constructed a set of policies which are almost predatory in nature concerning those details.

For example, Facebook seems to be more concerned with getting "a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook" to consider what it should do about people posting information about non users without prior consent.

It is a shame that the web itself cannot be the platform we all use to share, and that some kind of broken and greedy abstraction layer has to be applied to it so that the average internet user can get these things done.

Just like AOL was: Facebook is another way for a greedy dirtbag corporation to own the experience of people who mistakenly think that they're really using the internet.

Just like AOL proved to be: Facebook is completely unnecessary and will not survive a more open approach that empowers users to effectively own and control their data.

Just like AOL did: Facebook needs to die a long, arduous, and comical death so that all those who never believed in it can have the last laugh.

I am looking forward to the day Facebook dies, and sincerely hope those kids at Diaspora can pull off their dream.

People need a decent and simple way to share things from their lives, and one that doesn't make some prick and his scumbag buddies' wallets fatter with every additional million users- at the expense of those users.

Oh yeah, and one more thing...

If you are reading this post, and you are one of the people posting about me and my family to Facebook, please remove what you've posted and don't do it again.

Thanks.