Facebook privacy policies keep going down the drain. That's enough reason for many to abandon it.
Here you will find nine more:
After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on
Facebook. I'd like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I'd like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook
so that I'm not missing anything. In any event, here's my "Top Ten"
reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your
account.
10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sidedLet's
start with the basics. Facebook's Terms Of Service state that not only
do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't keep it
up to date
and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section
14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook's
interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their
other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you'll see, there's
no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see
their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting
data.
9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behaviorFrom the very beginning of Facebook's existence,
there are questions about Zuckerberg's ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used
Facebook user
data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to
discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat
dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO
of the world's largest social network. They're particularly compelling
given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacyFounder and CEO of Facebook,
in defense of Facebook's privacy changes
last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing
more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more
people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is
now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know
everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to
everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except
that ...
7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switchAt the same time that they're telling developers
how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about
explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook
gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and
then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of
monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts
to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about
themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this
regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible)
privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets
are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are
suing them (and winning).
6. Facebook is a bullyWhen Pete Warden
demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook's
privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they
announced
the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is now social." So why
sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for
making data publicly available when you're actually already planning to
do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't want
their membership to know how much data is really available. It's one
thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to
be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files
anyone can download and load into MatLab.
5. Even your private data is shared with applicationsAt this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the
application
developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping
your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically
challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your
data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you
simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.
4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trustedEven if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't
trust
Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked.
For example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it
rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social
network. Or how about
this gem for harvesting profile data?
These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such
as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the
cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They
either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very
good engineers, or perhaps both.
3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your accountIt's
one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but
where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had
enough, it's
pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application
you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is
incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account
settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns
out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can
still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have
to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly
easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account).
Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever
happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not
logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the
on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted" their account.
2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open WebThe
so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally
closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch
in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about
you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this
data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this
data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they
are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is
completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook.
A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we
prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they
implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while
aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative,
Facebook Connect.
1. The Facebook application itself ****sBetween
the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses
wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings
and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can
apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the
thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost
completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize
it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And,
yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything
to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly
your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.
Facebook
is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social
network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest
that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling
out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable thing in the world,
at least they've tried to stay focused and aren't trying to be
everything to everyone.
I
often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort
of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing.
They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep
in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social
networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them.
Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed - have
we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype,
the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could
personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining
their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains more or less a
rounding error for more established tech companies.
While
social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable
growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their
application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use
other providers. And so can you.
Source:http://gizmodo.com/5530178/
The Heart Sutra is one of the most well-known of mahayana buddhist
scriptures. Belonging to the family of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras,
it contains the very essence or "heart" of Buddha's teachings on emptiness
and the methods to develop the wisdom that understands this ultimate
nature. This book is an extensive commentary to this important text. In
accordance with the oral tradition transmitted to the author, both the
explicit and implicit meanings of the sutra are revealed and are related
to the practices of the five
mahayana paths leading to full enlightenment. Also included is a
detailed explanation of how to gain an initial understanding of emptiness, and how such an understanding can be used to overcome obstacles to happiness.
