mrchnd A place for geekery, complaints, & poorly written critiques.

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Facebook is just making me a bit uneasy as of late.  They recently trotted out a feature called "instant personalization".  Before you can really understand it, you need to know the very basic premise of Facebook.  The point of Facebook is to make money, and that is totally fine, it's the point of every business.  I don't know if I like how FB is making its money.  Everything you do on FB is recorded and analyzed.  Your "likes", "interests", "fan pages" and "apps" all collect data about you.  Any app you install has access to your profile and in some cases your information that you have set as private.  When you add up all the stuff you do on facebook you end up with a pretty good impression of who you are as a person, your personality.  That "stuff" (the collected data) is invaluable to advertisers and marketers and they pay wholeheartedly for it.  That's Facebook's business model, they sell very directed advertising that is based off your personality.  That's pretty straightforward but what about apps?

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Why are some apps shady?  For example, remember how popular quizzes on FB were a while ago?  The ones where you had to install an "app" to take it?  Odds are, the app was developed by a 3rd party, as in a company not affiliated with FB.  The information you gave them in the form of answers to their silly questions is theirs now.  Theirs to sell for a profit if they so choose.  Okay.....what if I don't install any apps.  I'm safe right?  No.  No you're not.  Say my brother (who isn't on FB) installs a 3rd party application to his account.  Maybe I have some sensitive information on my account that I explicitly only allow him to see (maybe a note or something).  No one else on FB has any permissions to see my secret note as far as I know.  Guess what?  The shady app that my brother installed inherited any access to information (pics, notes, etc) that I gave him.  That's a big deal.  I made no agreement with the app but now I have to think about it.  Not everyone is an enormous boring nerd like I am.  Most normal people install applications & games to their FB accounts because they a lot of fun.  Most normal people don't read the fine print when installing stuff.  If any of my friends (who I grant access to my information/profile) installs an untrustworthy application, that application has access to the things my friends have access to. Like it or not, it's out of my hands.

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Back to the "instant personalization" that I mentioned earlier.  FB is now going to take what they know about you a step further.  Right now there are 3 websites that Facebook partnered with.  Yelp, Pandora, and Docs.com.  These are all pretty good services on their own.  Facebook is going to do us the favor of taking all the data that they have collected and let these sites have access to it.  Fundamentally, it seems like a pretty cool idea.  Pandora can build a station of songs you like based on your profile on Facebook.  Pandora can then share what you're listening to back to FB.  The thing is, I want to be asked if it is okay with me.  Maybe I secretly like Lady Ga Ga and have a Pandora station of just her stuff.  I don't want FB knowing my most shameful music tastes.  What if it accidentally publishes to my wall?  Everyone would unfriend me immediately, I cant bear the shame of losing the staggering number of 80 friends.  But seriously, don't assume the privacy of your stuff on Facebook anymore....hence the sterilization of my profile.

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Instant personalization is turned on by default for everyone. Facebook needs to implement a policy of private by default, but they wont.  They'll trick you into over-sharing unless you pay close attention to your privacy settings.  Privacy settings that are obfuscated and confusing on purpose so you can't figure them out.  Look how long my ridiculous, paranoid, ranting post is just to explain a few things.

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I don't trust Facebook, they are trying to trick everyone and I don't like to be tricked.

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