Aug 17, 2009

Another Way to Pull Profit From You

The more I read about the Facebook, the more I dislike it. I can't believe that there's someone who actually believes to be entitled to the information of everybody. It's not one of those "blog-through"/"forward-through" info you get, maybe in youtube from a Michael Moore wannabe putting up some documentary, with all kinds of conspiratory data. No, this is sipped through the Washington Post. This time our trusty lil' paper tells us that Facebook, that cyberservice that started as a way to get to get in touch with your old friends, has bought an application (from what I understand) called "FriendFee". What this does is basically get into all your accounts in the net and tell everybody what you are doing. The "selling line" is that you won't have to do it manually, but what if I don't want everybody to know? What if what I write in the Twitter I want it to stay in the Twitter, and what I write here I want it to stay here? What if I don't want everybody to know what I do? Well, that's not a choice anymore. It seems that the profile sites decide for you what do you want to do with your data, and that's making them richer, selling your data to advertizing enterprises for their own profit and your annoyment.

But the FriendFee does more than tell everybody what you are doing on all your networks. This basically spies on you. Hooks up on you, follows you from account to account, to the web all the places you visit on the internet make, jumpling from the FB profile to your Twitter, your LJ, your blogs, e-mail accounts, MySpace, LiveSpace, your search engines (you know that you can tie up your Google and iGoogle to your gmail, and so your Yahoo! with your Yahoo account), keep track of everything you look for, from "cats" to "witchcraft", "genocide", "money laundry", "S&MB porn" or whatever strange thing you have looked up for for whatever reason. Then again there are worse things than all your dirty little secrets being displayed, because if they can get into your e-mail accounts, read and broadcast your blogs, post in your profiles and Twitter account, what wouldn't they be able to do with your banking accounts? What couldn't they do with your work accounts?

Not every data should be available to everybody. I think people should have the right to decide what to share with a few, what to keep for themselves and what to share with the world, and I don't believe that others should have the right to decide that whatever thing that goes cyber is fairplay for broadcast.

So, after much bitching I decided to close my profile forever and for good. Well, guess what? I just did and I received an e-mail telling me that my account has been deactivated, but that "I can reactivate it anymoment I want". Excuse me? Yes, they don't kill your account, they keep it "in case you want it back". That probably means that they keep the account alive, sucking in the information forever. Well, that's only natural, after all, they need the "clients" in order to sell data to their other clients. This is too intrusive and unrequested... FB, LEAVE ME ALONE!!

They don't believe I, or anyone for that matter, have those rights. Our rights in the cyber world stops where the corporations find it suitable. There are no "Human Rights" for the cybernaute.

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