Is Facebook evil?

Is Facebook evil?

Facebook is the undisputed champion of the social networking site, seeing off the challenge of lesser brands such as Myspace and Bebo and adapting to new threats like Twitter whilst maintaining a healthy influx of new users daily.

They have a reported (1) 1.11 billion users and despite some signs of the juggernaut finally starting to slow down, Facebook still has a massive reach and has a massive database filled to the brim with user information.

The early 2000's may be viewed as a different age in terms of social media. Maybe, as a society, we were too naive in entrusting corporation's with so much of our personal information.

It must have been the market research sectors dream come true. En masse we began to input our favourite films and stars, our friends, a whole online portfolio that could be accessed by anyone with the know-how.

Not that any sort of subterfuge was needed, Facebook are more than happy to sell your personal information on to marketing companies. (2) The linked article talks about how Facebook "will be targeting members information more closely" including "using your iPhone location services" (3) which is worrying on many levels.

Who would want that information and for what purpose? More to the point, do Facebook have a right to sell that information? Legally, they probably do but that is to be expected whenever you sign a draconian user agreement.

Never mind the marketing aspect, what about the intelligence agencies that actively monitor Facebook like the NSA (4) who can get "direct access" to everything that Facebook has on you?

Invasion of privacy via social media has come to be expected and people should rightly be more guarded about what they say on social media. As more employers use social media to learn more about prospective employees, profiles will become ever faker, a veneer used to disguise anything that may 'compromise' a person.

Hopefully people have learnt their lesson (although a quick scan through FB and common sense tell me that some people will never learn) and people will have to learn to get by without using social media numerous times a day.

If FB was a friend, it would be a terrible person, someone people would ask you not to associate with. It would constantly talk about you behind your back and constantly try to sell you stuff.

Facebook will eventually cease to be relevant as all things have to come to an end eventually. I just hope that the 'great strides' it made in violating it's users personal information isn't capitalised upon and taken further by the 'next big thing'.

As people become more savvy in the digital age, companies will probably stoop to lower depths to gain an advantage over the consumer. They will probably never stop seeing us as products to be collected and sold on, but as a whole we could end the company tomorrow simply by logging off and keeping it that way.

Maybe they would do well to remember that.