Facebook Falls on its Face

They say that you are not paranoid if they really are out to get you. My reluctance to embrace social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace because of their potential threat to my personal privacy has been validated.

Facebook has made a tremendous public relations blunder, either through incredible ignorance, or pure greed. In either case, site user’s information has been sold to advertisers for whatever use they wanted to put it to, without the knowledge of Facebook users. The data about user’s browsing habits were gleaned even when users were not logged in.

Unfortunately, because those of us who have been ranting for decades about the inevitability of greed overcoming trust on-line have been labeled as cranks, this is probably, at best, a violation of trust rather than a violation of any law that might have protected users from these creeps.

The New York Times has a good overview of the story. Chris Apollo Lynn has some excellent thoughts about the issue on his blog.