Facebook Privacy & Data Issue
When your one time rival is seeking to work with you, you can be sure you have not just triumphed over your competition but by a very large margin. When MySpace started using Facebook login API to login users to MySpace, it was only a symbolic throwing in of the tower by MySpace. Though Facebook is the run away winner of the social networking battle, a lot of critics are not impressed with Facebook privacy nor how easy Facebook has made obtaining and using your personal data entrusted to them.
A group of social networking users are so disgruntled with Facebook privacy that they are starting a social networking site called diaspora to rival Facebook purely because of what they see as Facebook privacy laxes. Another group of people with axe to grind with Facebook has just setup a fake dating website with 250,000 profiles of Facebook user profiles pulled from Facebook without any problems or vetting, they call the site Face to Facebook . They have a completely different reason for creating their project, its now to highlight privacy issue like diaspora is doing, its more an experimental art project where they just use Facebook user profile as the source of the faces they need for their project. In total, they extracted 1 million Facebook user profiles and narrow the pictures that meed their needs down to 250,000.
The reason whey the creator of Face to Facebook (they also created a second site called Lovely Faces)created the site is not really clear. Trying to figure this out from reading a page on their site called theory could almost give you a nose bleed, excerpt from the page follows:
Facebook is an eternal, illusory party, under surveillance and recorded for all time. Its structure invites you to first replicate and then enhance your real social structures, replicating your experiences on your own personal “screen space”.
In this unending party, you meet and join old and new friends, acquaintances and relatives. As with most parties everything is private, or restricted to the invited guests, but has the potential to become public, if accidental shared. Here the guests’ activity and interests are also recorded through their posts in different formats and media (pictures, movies, trips, preferences, comments). It’s an induced immaterial labour with instant gratification. Guests produce content by indirectly answering the question “who am I?” and they get new friends and feedback in the process.
Whilst its almost impossible to make sense of Face to Facebook or the motive behind it, one thing that is clear is the fact that if you are one of the 500 Million people who are said to have a Facebook account, anyone, anywhere could pull you Facebook profle and do what they want with it, you can even find yourself on a dating site looking for a partner even though you are not looking for one.
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