Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account…and why you should too.
This is Part 1 of a series I am doing on Social Media Sites and Privacy.
Here we go. Facebook is a social hang out for the lowest common denominator of the human condition.
To say that this is a heated debate would be the understatement of the year. I have spoken with many, many people and have done a fair amount of research to be able to back up the above statement. I will include all the links and then you can make your decision.
Facebook is a corporation not your friend.
Did Facebook get valued at $16 billion because they hang with you at Starbucks? Facebook is by it’s nature a collector of information. We sign up and give them all the information they need on our profile. We want our ”friends” to know as much about us as possible. Every bit of personal information you put on your profiles, notes, wall, and posted pictures are all compiled and used to sell to advertisers.
Don’t believe me check out this company. Usocial is an information broker who sells friend profiles on Facebook.
Their website says, ” Friends: people say they can’t be bought, though in this day and age it’s simply not the case. Our newest service will enable you to get more Facebook friends with ease by buying them in packages up to 5,000.
How we get you friends is simply by finding out exactly what industry, niche, or target market you are wanting to find people to target and then we go about attaining relevent friends for you and adding them to your Faceboook account. Every single person we gain for you will be real users and exactly relevant to what you are looking for — this is our guarantee.
On average and if marketed to correctly, every Facebook fan or friend you have is generally worth $1 to you per month, which is a figure anyone using this site correctly can back up. This means that even on a purchase of a 1,000 friend pack, you will not only return your investment in the first month, but earn more than five times what you’ve invested. Try and tell us that’s not a great investment.
Usocial seems extremly confident in their service. Does it make you mad that you might be manipulated to friend someone for the express purpose of monatary gain? It should.
Tomorrow we will talk about Facebook’s Terms of Service Agreement and how they use a service to track the sites you visit and the things you buy. Yes, they still use it.
I am not really a big fan of Facebook, but If people are willing to put their stuff out there to the public then they need to deal with the consequences.
Wow! Great post. I am looking forward to reading more.
That is crazy! I do use Facebook but am careful not to give out any information. Still, it is amazing how little privacy we really have anymore. I have heard a lot of people complain about the Kroger card tracking purchases, and they probably have no idea that their personal lives are being violated every moment of the day voluntarily on Facebook and who knows where else!
I agree with you Laura – My daughter has a MySpace account and I monitor it, but I did not even think about the information being used for this kind of service.