one million strong for Facebook sucking!
Three times already, I’ve been encouraged to enable the new “Timeline” feature on Facebook. I won’t, but I know enough about it that I’m sure it’ll totally set some people off.
With each redesign (can we call them that?) of Facebook, there’s outrage, but why? We use their product, it’s not our Facebook. It’s our speck of collected statuses in a vast, vast, vast wasteland of other collected statuses.
We’ve changed the definition of “ownership” in the digital space, haven’t we? We use Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr to share our thoughts, sure, but then those thoughts aren’t really ours anymore, right?
This blog is on a server I pay a monthly for, but I don’t own the server. If the server company goes out of business, I’m no longer “live”.
Facebook’s users are the product, not the client. They add features to cater to their clients. These features (re: games, Skype Video, Open Graph, et al) keep users on pages longer so advertisements get more impressions. Advertisers are the clients.
Also, advertisers are the clients!
This outrage is like assuming you own the road after buying a car. This is the conventional wisdom of 98% of the US population, it’s not reality. It’s for pedestrians, motorists, cyclists, and those seventeen Segway enthusiasts. We use the road, we don’t own it.
Increasingly, the Web provides popular products that collect, scrape, and track everything we’re doing. Amazon’s new browser caches the entire web. Google’s bots have indexed The Internet.
Facebook’s Open Graph creates passive sharing. Up until now, a user determined what was worthy to share with friends, family, and that guy looking at your summer bikini photos (where is that privacy setting anyway?).
While logged into Facebook, you can read an article on another site and it will post to your wall (or Timeline). Listen to a song and your friends (or creepy, voyeuristic subscribers) can listen to it. You no longer choose; everything’s worth sharing.
Don’t like that idea? You probably will. If you care now, you won’t in two weeks. If you don’t care now, you never have.
If that’s still not cool, man, here’s some ideas:
- Delete your cookies. All of them, or just the ones specific to Facebook. Make sure you got them.
- Use Private Browsing or an Incognito Window to use Facebook. Logging out is not enough.
- Do not let Apps access your profile. They’re are myriad settings and you may have to disable ones you didn’t know you allowed already.
- When Timeline is introduced (supposedly via opt-in), take an hour (or two; how long have you been on Facebook anyway?) to remove posts or photos you no longer want shared.
- Don’t like that Facebook doesn’t hide your birth year anymore (as has been reported)? Put in a fake one.
- Stop sharing anything online. Cancel with your ISP. Unplug your router. Disable your computer’s wifi. Never buy a coffee. Put a screwdriver through your iPhone and get a burner from Boost.
- Above all, don’t waste your time whining on Facebook (or any other social tool, for that matter).
It’s like that time you really had to get to Gap for that denim sale because the only good jeans you have are boot cut (seriously?) and three roads were blocked for that [Insert Ethnicity] Parade. Sure, totally annoying and O.M.G., but the next time you want to stroll that Analog Etsy Craft Fair Extravaganza, it’s totally cool.
You don’t own the road. The data on Facebook are not yours. As long as you realize this, the privacy changes and new designs are less and less meaningful.
Maybe that’s not so bad.
Image via Gigaom