"SUCKERS!!" Is the headline for a story today on MSNBC.
If you're a Facebook user, chances are you were warned over and over again about what you put into your profile, (eg; phone numbers, addresses, birthdates, other private data) and apparently plenty of people just ignored the warnings.
The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.
However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.
The information was posted by Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, on the Internet site Pirate Bay to highlight privacy issues, the BBC reported.
Many of us have a philosophy that "people are basically good" and we should begin our relationships from that premise and adjust as new information becomes available. Unfortunately, I think too many people automatically, perhaps subliminally, certainly subconsciously apply that philosophy to new relationships they begin with corporations, companies, and websites. The problem is that by the time you find out they aren't as good as you thought they were, a corporation or a website can do far more damage to you personally than someone who you shouldn't have told about your alcoholism but did because they seemed nice.
Facebook's owner, Mark Zuckerberg did a nice job developing a personal relationship with his members about privacy by appearing to keep them in the loop on changes to Facebook's privacy policy, the tenet of rules by which a member can expect Facebook to behave when it comes into posession of certain personal things about you like data, photos, and other materials. Zuckerberg even enriched the illusion of fraternity by asking for members' suggestions and doing a first draft on policy changes before changing it a second time based on input by interested members.
By the time the new policy was set down in May of 2010 ... it was already too late. Companies third party to Facebook were already purchasing whole lots of data without your knowledge. And once it's out there, it's out there. You can change your mind all you want but once you accidentally give your phone number to a stalker you can't un-give it.
So now, under the illusion that Facebook is a cool website run by a nice college boy named Mark, millions of people have been fleeced by what Facebook really is: a mega corporation out of Palo Alto, California interested in the same thing every single other corporation on the planet is interested in...profits.
Being in the broadcast field, I already had a healthy dose of cynicism about trusting corporations that appear to have my best interests in mind. When someone asks me, "what the hell happened to radio" I answer them with this little parable:
In the old days, radio was structured so that the listener was the customer, the music/talk/programs was the product, and the sponsors were the vehicle by which that transaction between a radio station and its customers was made possible. The radio station's job was to give the customer whatever he wanted. If enough listeners wanted a 1000 title song library rotation instead of the tight, 650 title hit rotation, the radio station would do a group focus to see how feasible it was and in the end give the customer whatever he wanted. The customer is always right.
Sometime back in the 80s a new dynamic was developing in radio about the time Clear Channel corp was launching a whole new set of rules by which soon the entire industry would begin to operate. Instead of stations hiring a host or announcer, they could use Clear Channel's new "Voice Tracking" idea - hire one guy to do the voice overs for all 60 of your Adult Contemporary stations around the country. Reagan era deregulations, FCC's loosening of enforcements, and finally allowing one parent company to own many radio stations, newspapers and television properties all gave way to a entirely new dynamic.
I remember getting the memo where I worked at the time: "THIS IS A COMPANY. IT IS A BUSINESS. WE ARE NOT A FAMILY". So began a the mission statement of a new model of business. And the business was to make money. Not entertain, not inform, not advocate.
So now when you turn on a radio station something just ... feels ... differently than it did 25 years ago. And this is why. This is the new dynamic:
A radio station's customer is now ... the advertiser. The music/talk/program is the mode by which the transaction is made possible. And the product ... is you.
So getting back to Facebook, I had already been darkened to investing any company with more than 20 people on its staff with any kind of trust level that would result in my telling them any more about myself than I would tell an anonymous caller with an unfamiliar accent.
Even just an email address is often all a data miner is looking for. That's why there are so many "FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW" chain letters out there, and so many hopeless gullible people out there gleefully complying. They hit "reply all" except resend the letter with every email address in their contact book. Not only does everyone in their contact book get the forwarded letter, joke, or propaganda memo ... but so does the original sender, some little data mining company somewhere in Bangladesh making $500K a day by selling that database of email addresses to advertisers all over the globe.
It's probably too late to go back and un-do any mistakes you've made with Facebook. But still, you should reconsider giving them all of that information. You should reconsider giving any corporation the leverage of knowing more about you than you know about them.