Facebook Is Evil, But People Are Stupid

The flare up over Facebook’s recent terms-of-service change has been interesting, but even some of the people protesting the change on Facebook seem clueless about what they’re actually doing when they post things in Facebook.

The big change that people apparently got worked up about was Facebook granting itself a license in perpetuity to content that users posted on the site. On that point I can actually see where Facebook is coming from. When I delete my account at Facebook, I really want to delete all of my activity there. But that’s going to create all sorts of problems over the long term.

For example, I’ve got a few moderately successful Pages at Facebook that are devoted to different topics and individuals. Are those Pages my property or Facebook’s? If I want to delete my account, should this also delete the public page I created devoted to Negativeland? I’m not so sure.

Regardless, though, I suspect a lot of users  completely misunderstand where the real threat is — other users (i.e., all of those “friends” they’re collecting and showing content to).

NBC, for example, featured a brief soundbite from someone it billed as an organizer as one of the anti-TOS groups on Facebook. His argument against the new TOS was that, well, what if he wants to run for President a decade from now and Facebook has all of his posts and pictures and controls those rather than him.

If you’re running for President a decade from now, of course that stuff is going to show up on the nightly news. But it’s not Facebook you need to worry about, it’s your friends who are saving copies of that crazy picture of you stoned out of your mind at a party that you have to worry about (ask Michael Phelps). As we’ve learned repeatedly in the digital age, once something gets posted in a public or semi-public area on the Internet, it is very rare that it ever completely disappears.

I’m always amused, for example, by the people who screw up and send out offensive e-mails accidentally. Most corporate mail systems have the capability to let you “revoke” such e-mails, and most people seem to think that’s actually effective. Except there are so many different methods and clients to access e-mail that I suspect it is very rare that an e-mail is actually disappeared in this manner (I know I have a number of e-mails in my archive where the sender clearly hit the “revoke” button after thinking twice after hitting “send” ).

The problem with Facebook is that it gives a false sense of intimacy — we have “Friends” who update their “Status” — and its privacy settings require advanced understanding of Boolean logic to use adequately. Facebook wants users to think they’re at a small, friendly get-together, when in actuality Facebook is more like 55 million individual reality TV shows.