I don’t really have much to say on this subject, but I’m really interested in the articles that are starting to emerge about how Facebook and similar social networking sites are being used for political activism in places like the Middle East and Columbia. When you couple these with phenomena in our more immediate experience, such as candidates raising $7 million from small donors in a couple of days over the internet or educators rallying to assemble a list of prior art against an edupatent, I think there are real signs that the activism is beginning to enter a new era with new rules.
Except of course its CIA-funded so you’d better make sure its only pro-USA activism you’re engaged in, or that all your activities will work fine even with prior warning being given by FB to the US government, US companies and their foreign interests.
Note also that it has already banned one Canadian union organizer.
If you want to organize an activist network using SoSo, look at hosting something like BarnRaiser instead (http://www.barnraiser.org/) in a country with better anti-snooping laws.
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. Do you seriously think that the CIA had the foresight to predict that Facebook would take off? The CIA? For that matter, do you really believe that Facebook, after all their egregious mistakes, has the competence to be in the spy business?
That doesn’t mean your larger point about using a system in a country with better privacy laws isn’t valid.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
FB doesn’t need to be competent in spying. It just has to look the other way while all its user’s private data gets harvested. Which if you’ve read the ‘privacy’ policy…
Oh, come on.
To begin with, how much objectivity can you impute to an article that leads with the sentence, “I despise Facebook”? A good chunk of this piece is a stupid rant against social software in general.
And what is the evidence the author provides for this grand conspiracy? The big one is that he doesn’t like the politics of some of the VCs who have invested in Facebook. If you’re going to punt on every technology company that takes money from somebody whose politics you don’t like, then you’d better learn to love your pencil again. So PayPal founder Peter Thiel is a wingnut. Does that mean that every investment that he and the so-called “Paypal Mafia” (cue dark music) is intended to steal our souls? I guess that means I should stop using Kiva, a microlending non-profit started by a former PayPal employee. And is the author seriously making the connection that because one of Greylock’s partners is also on the board of a VC firm that the CIA uses to invest in new technologies that everything Greylock invests in is therefore somehow controlled by the CIA? That’s pretty thin gruel.
Of course, the other bit of evidence is the privacy policy. First of all, it reinforces my point that the competence isn’t there. Did AT&T advertise in its privacy policy that the CIA was tapping every American’s phone? I don’t think so. Facebook’s privacy policy is reprehensible, but it’s clearly motivated by commercial reasons rather than some secret deal with the spooks–just as Thiel’s and Greylock’s investments can be accounted for much more simply by the fact that they want to make money. And by the way, you point out Facebook’s policy as if it’s unusual. Have you read Google’s privacy policy? Or Microsoft’s? They’re all terrible. This is a serious, serious problem, especially for educators who are thinking about using these services with their students, but it is in no way evidence that Zuckerberg goes to work in a black helicopter every day.
Actually, for educators and students I think the degree of ambiguity here is probably OK for working with FB (general caveats on terrible privacy policies in the industry aside).
However, you were recommending (hmm, maybe more “recognising”?) the use of FB for organising political activism, where a degree of at least mild paranoia is advisable.
“Recognizing” is definitely the correct verb. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I still don’t fully “get” Facebook, much less recommend it.
Your points about the privacy policy and US privacy laws are both absolutely reasonable–important, even. It’s when they are used to build a case for the conspiracy theory that you lose me.