A good, thoughtful piece on Facebook, and the maturing of social media and how we use it. A few favourite quotes:
When Rupert [Murdoch]invades your privacy, …. it’s against the law. When Mark [Zuckerberg] does, it’s the future…
After a period of idealizing social media, the public is beginning to recognize that these are enterprises with ambitions and appetites. They are businesses. Public companies have an imperative to grow profits, which Facebook will do by monetizing you and me — serving us up as the targets for precision-guided advertising…
Somewhere on his way from Harvard geek to Silicon Valley titan, Mark Zuckerberg adopted an ideology of “radical transparency.” He is getting what must be an uncomfortable dose of that now. This surge of scrutiny ought to make us smarter, more sober consumers. The challenge for Facebook is how to retain the trust of its wised-up users even as he commoditizes us — that is, how to sell us on without creeping us out.
I am not active on Facebook but have kept my account as I need it for the sharing function on WordPress. And I am also hearing from my son that Facebook is less ‘cool’ now, and that a number of people are opting out – as the article notes, this is a drop in the bucket but interesting nevertheless.
I closed my Facebook years ago. The move by Facebook to allow all children under 13 the right of use of Facebook is going to create an avalanche of legislation to protect children from exploitation.