Those kids at Facebook just can’t catch a break. In their continuing quest to throw every piece of advertising trash against their ‘members’ to see what sticks, they have really outdone themselves this time. Facebook’s problem is they can’t decide if they are Fight Club or WalMart. First rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. Wal Mart on the other hand offers cheap shit to anybody they can get to walk in the door.
Starting our at Harvard as an electronic collegiate Fight Club whose actual authorship is still under a cloud, ( $65 Million settlement under seal is not proof of genesis , but a legal expedient to remain attractive to advertisers and the burgeoning covens of ‘Social Media Firms’) it was just another club with Membership requirements, you know, like actual verification of attendence at Harvard. Since opening up their ‘membership’, the only requirement is an internet connection and a pulse.
This in concert with their Terms of Service allowed them to grant themselves a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of (“use”) any content you post on or in connection with Facebook.” every piece of text photo and page on their servers. So the AdMen descended on Facebook like a pack of rabid dogs finding a kitten in their yard. The natives started getting restless when they discovered that their photos were being use for product endorsements without explicit permission. That was the Beacon lunacy. Cheap at 9.5 Million to settle that one. According to PC World:
Facebook has terminated the Beacon program and agreed to pay $9.5 million into an interest-bearing account to create a nonprofit foundation that will “fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security.”
Source: PC World
Anybody seen this Foundation?
The latest Playing at Privacy episode is the new privacy settings that default to public everything, if you do not go through a whole bunch of settings.
You will be able to hide some things, but the vital Advertising Targeting Information will be available to all like:
Some information–including name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks you belong to, friend lists, and pages you’re a fan of–will be available to everyone
Source c|Net
So you will be able to keep that photo of you puking on somebodies sofa private until the game changes because the ROI falls. Trust me, Facebook is not designed to help you find and share your interests, it is designed to let advertisers sell you shit.