DO ME A SOLID AND READ THIS BEFORE CLICKING THE LINK BELOW?
I'LL PAY YOU BACK, I SWEAR.
(This was originally posted on Facebook. You may have read it there on the Privacy Party event invitation page)
DO NOT DELETE YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT OR DELETE APPS UNTIL YOU READ AND UNDERSTAND HOW ALL OF THIS IS CONNECTED! YOU WILL REGRET IT!
Once you have read through everything you'll see that there really is no way to evade Facebook's reach completely.
That said, you do have some control over how much you share.
Don't believe that deleting your account or browsing but not posting will make a single bit of difference.
It's not just Facebook.
It's the 66+ companies owned by Facebook, the 15,000+ websites using Facebook login and the many thousands of app and developer partners to which you have inadvertently given permission to peer into you personal information.
There are around 29,000 categories of data Facebook currently bundles from each user and sells for billions of dollars in profits
Right now they don't care as much about what you have to say as they do about your behavior. They already have your facts.
You'll see. Read the blogs.
I am not a paranoid, conspiracy theory type. I'm probably one of the more trusting people you'll ever meet.
BUT THIS IS INSANE!
After hundreds of hours of research I believe (as you also probably suspect) that Facebook is the single most culpable contributor to the angry and fractured state of our world today.
(Maybe second, but only to our POTUS)
Everything we love or care about it being destroyed by Facebook.
That's a bold conclusion, but when you read what I have compiled you'll see why that's true in ways you might have never considered.
Yes, Google and Apple and Microsoft, Twitter and all the others are also culpable, but Facebook outpaces them all. By a stunning margin.
The information I have compiled consists of facts from web articles, magazines, podcasts, legal filings, stock filings and other sources.
As much as I wrote on my blog, it barely scratches the surface of the information I have collected.
I have tried my best to verify everything you will read. There may be a few outdated figures and random errors, but you'll see that the preponderance of evidence presented points to one conclusion.
We have anti-trust laws in America that are designed to regulate monopolies, but after undertaking this research, I really don't think anyone knows it all.
I didn't find a single site on the Internet that had a comprehensive look at all of the issues and how they interconnect. There are thousands of helpful articles about individual subjects, I just put them together.
That said, there are hundreds of privacy cases pending in the European court system, (where they take privacy a lot more seriously that we do in America. Others have already been decided and awaiting appeal decisions because Facebook is committed to appealing every single one of them, instead of changing. And you'll see why.
This issue is coming at us all, fast.
You'll probably feel like there isn't anything you can do now. I have had that feeling, too.
But there is.
You are a product. You can choose to take the steps to become the most unappealing and expensive product you can be.
You can limit the data you squirt from your friends, comments, scrolls and hovers, directly into the Facebook FOR SALE sale bucket.
Facebook is not going to censor this information. They aren't focused on that and that would get them in trouble, anyway. Censorship is easy to understand and it provides great cover for the real goal that nobody notices.
We are going to use the tools they have provided us to work against them in an effort to force a conversation. And lawsuits. And government regulation.
Talk about this. Share. Use hashtags like # Face book (characters typed together) or @ face book (characters typed together) to ask them questions.
Share graphics, because we know that's what errbody LIKES.
Be at the front of this issue instead of putting your head in the sand.
Account deletions won't amount to much until they reach a critical mass of the kind we cannot possibly force right now.
Get in on the ground floor- start bitching. :)
I am not leaving right now. This is too important to me. But to stay and ignore just isn't something I can do anymore.
I'll be writing more about these issues on my new blog and sharing as I can on Facebook.
At the same time, I am committed to breaking up with my phone, so posts will be less frequent.
I'll also be publishing some great tips for limiting phone and Facebook use later this week.
Right now I need to go throw up.
Last word- Today I block-walked for a candidate for public office. The irony of the fact that I was being guided and directed to likely voters that are partly a product of this data mining did not escape me.
There are some good things happening, too.
Big Love.
