May 29, 2010
I recently read Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook written by Dan Yoder, and as with all articles I read it thoroughly before passing judgement, though it did feel paranoid and biased even with the little disclaimer at the beginning. So after taking some time to absorb his opinion I realised mine hadn’t changed, I didn’t disagree with all the points but did feel it certainly wasn’t a balanced view.
In this post I am not going to analyse each of the ten reasons individually or too closely, this will just be my opinion as a user, consumer and social being. Just in case you haven’t read Dan’s full article (link above) I have listed the ten reasons here for easy reference.
Firstly, I am going to cover the repetition of reasons five, seven, eight, nine and ten. Basically these five reasons are at the centre of the ‘paranoia’ I spoke of earlier; they state between them that Facebook is changing its terms of service so that it can share your data, making it publically available while at the hands of some unscrupulous overlord (when you say it like that you can see why I use the word ‘paranoid’!). My issue with this perception is that Facebook is a business that offers a service for free, obviously they need to monitise this and as user data is a growing market I think they would be foolish not to focus on its potential.
So let’s take the supermarket Tesco for example, they have been collating shopper buying habits now with their ‘Clubcard’ points system for some years and I suspect they aren’t just collecting this data for the fun of it; surely it stands to reason that if they know what you are buying they can target you more effectively and increase their profits. My point is that either Tesco get our data and hit us or another company collects the same data and sells it to someone else, one way or another they will find the information they want. In addition, if this data is being used for the hard sell of products then doesn’t the user simply need to become more aware and less gullible. In addition to this, who is to say that collection of user data is a bad thing, companies selling you things you need so you don’t need to shop around may not sound that bad to some shoppers, or am I missing something?
We should also bear-in-mind that Facebook is a huge brand, like Microsoft if it steps out of line or tries to monopolise the market it is big enough to be noticed by all the authorities that matter, and they are not stupid.
Can Facebook be trusted technically and does it really support the open web? These two views seem to me to be biased as I am pretty sure there are many other big brand names whose websites are like Swiss Cheese technically, and i don’t think it is alone in its fear of the open web, just look at the newspaper industry, the fear of not making enough money will always win unfortunately.
For balance, I do think the interface could be more intuative and stable, and if account deletion is as difficult as Dan states then this is a negative. However, I do have a number of friends who have decided to leave Facebook for different reasons than Dan states but they didn’t seem to have any problems leaving at all!
In conclusion, Facebook has been a revolution for people in all walks of life. It has helped millions communicate with family and friends from all around the globe, it has broken down barriers and given those who can’t get out a window into a social world; if it wasn’t Facebook offering this service and sharing the data it would be some other organisation and many already are. Even in the last few days Facebook has announced a new simpler way of checking the privacy settings on all accounts, that certainly sounds like a company trying to do the right thing to me!
Filed under life in general, technology