Saturday, September 9, 2017

Fackebook

I haven't signed up for Facebook, and I don't plan on doing so at any time in the future. The site originated in a misogynistic, invasive college website, it compiles all sorts of information about its users including facial recognition data... and I really don't need to know that some guy I worked with twenty years ago is now a deplorable racist or woman-hater. No Facebook for me, thank you.

As if things couldn't get any worse, Facebook accepted a one-hundred thousand dollar ad buy from Russian sources seeking to affect the presidential election. Even worse, many of the fake Russian Facebook accounts were set up to promulgate divisive causes such as Texan and Californian secessionist movements; anti-immigrant, Muslim, and LGBT stances; and right-wing conspiracy theories.

I've long maintained that Facebook is a cesspool, but this sort of unopposed propaganda war takes the cake- Facebook compiles all sorts of data on its legitimate users, it's long past the time that they take steps to keep tabs on hostile foreign actors, who shouldn't be difficult to suss out.

4 comments:

mikey said...

Hmmm. Know what that sounds like, Mr. Bastard?

That sounds like "I haven't read the book but I hear it's a piece of crap."

Lots of us are having a very good conversation on Facebook every day. We talk about liberal politics, we talk about our lives, we share pictures and laughs. Sure doesn't seem like a 'cesspool' at all - rather just a really effective platform for a wide spectrum of digital communications.

And compiling data on users? Sure. Facebook knows a lot of my interests, they know I'm politically liberal, they know who my friends are. You know who knows a great deal more than them? Your ISP, who has your entire browsing and email history. Your selective digital privacy naivety is really quite precious.

It's kind of funny - just last week I was thinking about trying to get you to join in the conversation we're having on Facebook. I know you'd enjoy the banter and back n forth, but at this point I'll just skip the whole exercise.

Online privacy is a funny thing. If you put something on the internet, it's not private anymore. It has nothing to do with Facebook - your blog posts aren't private, Google knows even the ones you never publish. Every packet you send out over the network can be captured, disassembled and retained by every single entity it passes through. TCP/IP is funny like that - if it couldn't read your packet headers it wouldn't know how to deliver them. Oh, and TLS? Whoever is providing the TLS transport has the keys.

Honestly, if someone as deeply involved in internet security as I am is OK with Facebook, I think you'd probably be ok. But it's up to you - if you REALLY don't want to die in a car accident, you can always just walk. But me, I'll take advantage of the modern conveniences, thank you very much...

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

...and some of us are on Facebook just to argue with mikey....

FWIW, my son is now working as a Software Engineer with an Internet Security firm, and he's OK with FB as well.

Unknown said...

"I haven't read the book but I hear it's a piece of crap."


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Unknown said...

F FAKEBOOK