Head Tale

Facebook has a
long history of implementing features that are counter to what users
want and/or treating their users like shit with a general lack of respect. 



Lately, Facebook
has been giving an even stronger impression than ever before (if that's
even possible) that their early appeal as the one social web site which
gave you total control over your information and your privacy is on its
way to the dustbin of history as they try to establish an even more
dominant position online by sharing and connecting more and more user
information which was previously private. 

Given their founder's early
actions to
his recent
flip-flop comments, this isn't surprising.  But it is frightening. 

A sample of the coverage…


The
Facebook Privacy Wars Heat Up (The Atlantic)



Facebook's
new social features secretly adds apps to your profile (PC World – this story
has been amended to say that this was due to a “bug” but I think
previously, Facebook has used this same reason to backtrack when it was
obvious they were testing the waters on something that would be
controversial.)




Facebook further reduces your control over your personal information (Electronic Frontier
Foundation)




The Facebook privacy settings you've lost forever (Gawker)



Facebook
chat security breach (CBC)



If Google was
smart, they would re-jigger Orkut, give it a much
better name and promote the hell out of it (top search result for every
search you do?) to try and take market share from Facebook at this
critical point in the social networking wars. 

If there was an easy way
to jump and Orkut somewhat mirrored Facebook's features, I think I'd
seriously consider making the jump.  But barring that, I'm really
thinking about giving my account a good pruning at the minimum. 

I'm not ashamed of too
much I have on there but at the same time, I might not want every
single person doing a web search for “Jason Hammond” to know I'm a fan
of say, Stampede Wrestling as well as a supporter of gay marriage.  Who
knows what people
might infer?



I have no doubt
that Google is no less dangerous than Facebook as a single entity of
power online.  But they are much less blatantly in your face about it!