Facebook has been an integral part of my life since Oct 2004—back when only a hundred or so colleges and their constituency were part of the social networking site.
It has since grown from a fledgling, exclusive college-only website of many interconnected networks, into an Internet behemoth that rivals Google and Microsoft with its web ubiquity. A lot has changed. And not all of it for the better.
The sticking point here is privacy. Or the lack thereof, if Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has his way. Zuckerberg is a proponent—and a very vocal and powerful one at that!—of transparency. This isn’t the type of transparency i’ve lauded; it’s a harrowing coming-to-fruition prophecy, a rhetoric with churning legs grown stronger the more he alters Facebook’s privacy settings without prior user consent, hedging bets that a greater percentage of the 500 million users will not speak out, and will not take the time (or truly care) to protect themselves. This results in the big issue: the increase in Web ubiquity of Facebook, the vaulted power of search engines like Google and Yahoo!soft with their data mining, and the acceptance by users of single sign-on for all their websites, allowing unlimited third parties to access their data.
Regardless of all this, hope is not lost; there still is a fight coming from Facebook’s bread and butter: a portion of its 500 million user-base.
The original article where Zuckerberg spews his BS is courtesy of the NYTimes.