Facebook: A Charming Girl Who Will Sell You to the First Bidder

On more than one occasion, when I answered “no, I’m not on Facebook”, people reacted almost as if I said I was Amish. Considering how ridiculous perceiving me as digitally disconnected is in spite of my quite extreme daily communication and technology overdose and in spite of the fact that Facebook is a communication tool only as a side effect, I thought the subject deserved a word or two.

To begin with, why would you want to do anything important counting on support from people you don’t trust? Given the amount of time people spend on the site, I doubt many users can deny they consider the service important. I find it difficult to find more than a few companies which give me less reason to trust them than Facebook. To begin with, the company founder and CEO (M. Zuckerberg) labelled users of his service using language I don’t care to repeat. Then, there is the fact that the primary goal of Facebook is to make money and it does that by selling information about its users. How does that work? The service gets free information about you, your social circle, the place you live, what you do for a living etc. and sells that data to advertisers so that they could entice you to spend more. Your best interest is not even a side goal of the company: why would you have anything to do with it?

Then there is the related issue of privacy.