Is Facebook benign, evil or indifferent?

Minoosh

Penultimate Amazing
Minoosh
Joined
Jul 15, 2011
Messages
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Facebook is beginning to creep me out. I'm sure some people naturally use it as their home page and the company wants to build it as THE Internet portal for searches, streaming video, digital downloads, shopping, etc. Someone mentioned that changes in the news feed were amplifying an echo-chamber effect by selectively dishing out views you agreed with. I'm not expressing this very well, but I have a couple of concerns. First, I doubt the company has any scruples about privacy, and a lot of users don't seem to mind. It's not always obvious how to change privacy settings. The entire interface will reportedly change dramatically soon and that will mean more navigational challenges. By default or design a more narcissistic experience is evolving as unrelated Web surfing begins to affect Facebook content. It seems almost as if we are wiring ourselves for surveillance. Even if it's not nefarious in intent, the complexity of using the site leaves me feeling that entities outside my control are sucking up information about me, slicing, dicing and sharing it, aiming to please - and manipulate. Any thoughts?
 
A hammer is a tool. It is not an entity to which can be ascribed motives - it just does what the person holding it wants it to do. It can hammer a nail in a roof over a starving Haitian child, or it can bash that child's head in. It can beat swords into ploughshares, or it can be used to nail a man to a cross. It all depends on how you use it.

Facebook is like a hammer. It can be forceful and unsubtle at times, but it can also be used to construct great and powerful ideas. It all depends on how you use it.
 
Minoosh said:
Even if it's not nefarious in intent, the complexity of using the site leaves me feeling that entities outside my control are sucking up information about me, slicing, dicing and sharing it, aiming to please - and manipulate. Any thoughts?
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I have an account but entered the minimum information necessary to sign up. Haven't added one bit of data since.

If someone is using Facebook to data mine on me, they gonna hit a dry well.
 
Minoosh said:
entities outside my control
(...)
Any thoughts?
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Facebook is a public place where people meet, like the local street somewhere. Just privately owned, designed and controlled. A better option would be a service run by an international non-profit NGO, whose administration is elected every year. But it takes huge sums of money to run something like this, so as long as governments don´t pay it, private investors will.
 
WildCat said:
Pure evil.
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I am beginning to think so. Or at least, so uncaring for the privacy of their users that there isn't much difference in effect.

I basically left Facebook last week because of comments made by Mr. Z which appear to me as though he means to sell personally-identifiable history with what items were looked at and when. Sorry. I accept that you can steer me search results, and I accept that you can sell information about preferences of groups of people not identified, but I will not stick around if you want to sell personally identifiable information.

If anybody has seen a clarification of this, I would like to see it.
 
Maybe Facebook will morph into the emergent consciousness that some AI enthusiasts theorize. Biggest crowd, big "cloud," and technically proficient enough to discreetly tap into computers all over the planet. If Facebook ends up with more information and more users and more computing power than has ever previously been assembled - where will it end? Could Facebook become conscious?

And even if the answer is no - if corporations are proxy "people" Facebook could become the most powerful person on the planet.

What got me started on this was an item about a change in the "newsfeed" function that made you even more likely to hear news only from your friends. (I'm not a techie. Something like that). Then someone posted instructions for fixing that. So, even though Facebook is a "tool," it can make subtle changes, which you might not be aware of, to customize things maybe a bit more than you actually want. Now combine that with the achievable ambition of becoming the world's biggest advertising portal.

You use the tool. It's just a business. But Facebook's job - its mandate - would be to keep you on Facebook and maximize shareholder value by maximizing revenue it can extract from you. It seems like a formula for a monopoly on mass manipulation.
 
There is a funny picture going around Google+ (yes, I see the irony but stick with me here) that says "Facebook and You: If you are not paying for it you're not the customer, you're the product being sold".
 
Allecher said:
There is a funny picture going around Google+ (yes, I see the irony but stick with me here) that says "Facebook and You: If you are not paying for it you're not the customer, you're the product being sold".
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That's good!
 
It's a corporation, therefore it would be considered sociopathic if analyzed as a human. It's completely self-interested, caring nothing for your existence except when you can be used to help it. The decisions it makes will be made almost exclusively on the basis if "What can I get out of this?".
 
Social networking sites are businesses in which the users are the commodities that the business "sells". Treating people as commodities strikes me as a pretty good baseline definition for evil.
 
JJM 777 said:
Facebook is a public place where people meet, like the local street somewhere.
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I believe that the Internet, more than anything else, is made less understandable by analogy; it can only be productively considered or discussed, in its own terms.

By the time you're done qualifying a "local street somewhere" that is properly analogous to Facebook, you've described something that is entirely unlike any street anywhere. Instead of making Facebook more understandable, by likening it to a city street you've made it less understandable, and contributed to the myriad misunderstandings that people have about the Internet and its implications.

The Internet changes everything. Movable type is nothing, compared to the Internet. The Internet, and its contemporary technologies, demand new modes of thought, new social and informational paradigms. Making analogies to things that are not the Internet only gets in the way, and retards humanity's necessary adaptation to the new environment it has created but not yet evolved to inhabit.
 
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Mostly benign. I really don't see how anything I put on my facebook account can do me any harm. But then again, I am more or less sensible about what I use it for. Misused, facebook can have evil consequences, but that's a bit like blaming automobiles for being sold without speed suppressors and portable blood-alcohol testers/immobilzers.
 
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