four-thirty-three

It’s hard enough trying to limit the amount of high-fructose corn syrup coming into my body… do I really have to limit my Facebook time as well?

Take a walk with me, if you will, down Tinfoil Hat Lane.  Um, bring a tinfoil hat.

Facebook went online in 2004, founded by Mark Zuckerberg (then a student at Harvard).  Some classmates of Zuckerberg’s would later sue Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg built his site using their source code.  Facebook settled that lawsuit last year (it just came out that the settlement’s price tag was $65 million).  So, we see right off the bat that Zuckerberg is (possibly) kind of a shady guy.

Now, if you want the shit scared out of you, watch this short movie.

Synopsis: Facebook’s initial venture capital came from Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal who also sits on the board of Vanguard PAC, a leading right-wing conservative organization.  Thiel also serves on other corporate boards with people who have connections to data mining companies, the CIA and DARPA.  While I think some of the links the movie’s creator forges are a bit of a stretch, it does seem like Thiel is a dick, and is connected to some folks who would have a vested interest in using Facebook to not-nice ends.  (Thiel continues to sit on Facebook’s board, in case you were wondering).

Facebook’s initial membership was composed of college students, i.e. the population most likely to post embarrassing photos and tales about themselves.  This being college, a good chunk of these people are super-liberal/leftist… having a Facebook profile is de rigeur for almost every humanities graduate student I know, and these are not generally subscribers to the National Review.  In 2007 or so, people begin flocking to Facebook from other social networking sites (one scholar points to issues of class stratification as being a major reason behind the Facebook/MySpace divide, and from my experience on both sites I’d tend to agree with her).  We too proceeded to post notes about events in our lives and upload photos of ourselves wearing rubber shirts and mascara (oh wait, that last one was just me).  When I first joined Facebook, I thought that it was sketchy that Facebook claimed an exclusive right to “create derivative works” from activity on the site (is that why Facebook refers to all activities taken on the website as “stories?”).  I obviously relented.

Not too big a deal, until Facebook’s recent change in their terms of service.  In short, they allege that when you upload content you grant Facebook a license to do whatever they want with it.  Forever.  Even if you take it down and/or close your account (and it seems to be retroactive).  Another blogger notes that, if you have a “share this link with Facebook” widget on your personal website, Facebook’s new ToS would seem to imply that you’re thereby granting them a license to do whatever they want with content posted on your personal site. (Note the lack of any of that widgety “share with social networking/link aggregator site X” shit here at four-thirty-three; I think this is a decent enough blog, but I’m cool with it never being the next big thing on the internets and totally ok with a low-double-digits readership.)

So, here’s this social networking site run by an guy who allegedly built it from stolen code, which would make him a pretty unethical dude if it’s true.  There’s at least one right-wing Republican on Facebook’s board of directors, and he sits on other  corporate boards with some total douchebags.  They claim that they now have, in perpetuity, a license to use any information you share with Facebook in any way they wish.

I think you see where I’m going with this.

Most people are (rightly) concerned with what this means for original work they’ve published/linked to on Facebook.  That’s a legitimate concern, but my nightmare scenario is this:  Suppose a young future-Obama type stupidly uploads a photo of his youthful drug use (maybe taking a Michael Phelps-ian bong hit).  Twenty-five years later, unethical right-wingers at Facebook (or whoever purchased the rights to their user-created content in the interim) disseminate those photographs and other delectable nuggets drawn from the person’s Facebook activity to news agencies, ruining his or her chance at high public office.  Picture all of the possible variations on this theme.  And, it would all be totally legit based on these terms of service.

So, what is there to be done?

Well, if you’re not making your information as private as you can as far as other users are concerned, consider doing so.  That’s not the biggest concern here (the real enemy is Facebook itself, not your boss, your ex or your creditors), but it’s never a bad idea to protect yourself/your identity online.

If you’re going to use Facebook (I haven’t decided whether I’m deleting my profile or not, but I’m leaning toward “yes”), don’t input/upload a fucking thing onto the site that you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing on the front page of the newspaper.  Again, never bad advice when doing stuff online in general, but I think several extra degrees of caution are called for here.  This includes Facebook’s email and IM functions; your email is very much not secure there, so don’t use it for organizing or anything even remotely illegal.

And, consider a less evil social networking site, like tribe.net.

This entry was posted Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 7:44 pm and is filed under the internets. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.