Facebook wants you to work for it, for free

Are you getting the impression that I’m not entirely keen on Facebook? Facebook Questions is its latest attempt to be like the AOL of the 90s, but more annoying and evil.

It’s a simple enough plan: make every single link on Google point to a Facebook page. Where’s the best place to buy a T-31 Modulator? Ask Facebook. What’s the best time of year to go turtle punching? Ask Facebook. How can I tell if I have a horrible bum disease? Ask Facebook. Have we always been at war with Eurasia? Ask Facebook.

Fear and loathing and Facebook

I don’t like Facebook. I don’t trust it. I don’t like the way it enables people you’ve avoided for 20 years to annoy you. I don’t like the way its privacy settings are so complex it needs an enormous article to explain them. And I don’t like its ambitions to enclose the entire Internet. There was a good example of that this morning, when it asked me to “Try Friend Finder”. All I need to do is give Facebook my email address and password.

Friend Finder has been around for a while, and what it does is simple: it uses your email account to email your contacts and tell them to join Facebook. I think that’s a step too far, and so do the German authorities, who may fine Facebook for breaking the country’s strict marketing regulations.

It’s no secret that when you use Facebook you’re its product, not its customer – its customers are the marketers who want to precision-target you – and yet I still have an account. If Facebook is so evil – and I think it is – why keep using it? Instead of keeping the “keep me signed in” button unticked and keeping your personal data to a minimum, why not just commit Facebook suicide?

The answer’s simple enough. It’s where my friends are. I’d much prefer it if they used email and Twitter, but they don’t, so I have a choice: put up with Facebook, or lose touch with people I don’t want to lose touch with.

A post on Metafilter - in a discussion about blocking Facebook Connect - last night expressed it perfectly. Over to you, Manjusri:

It’s like everyone I knew in highschool, and all my former coworkers and extended family decided to get together for a party. But for some reason they decided to hold it at residence of the biggest dick in highschool. Apparently they don’t see this guy as a dick, or his dickishness doesn’t rub them the wrong way. In any case I can either skip the party on principle or show up and politely warn friends about the host and enjoy the opportunity to reconnect with people. Just because I accept that this is where everyone is doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.

Power, corruption and lies

Me, writing about the Digital Economy Bill debacle:

Life, death and the Digital Economy Bill

The Digital Economy Bill gets rushed through Parliament today, potentially leading to whistleblowing sites being blocked. I’ve written a wee bit about it:

The bill doesn’t include anything about banning sites politicians and the military don’t want you to see, but it doesn’t need to. By including a clause that could enable the blocking of sites accused of copyright infringement, the bill could block WIkileaks, and collateralmurder.com, and any site that attempted to mirror the clip. The footage, like many things Wikileaks is given by whistleblowers, is copyrighted material.

Other people’s privacy

I meant to blog this earlier and completely forgot: it’s a typically incisive piece by Nicholas Carr on Google, Facebook and privacy.

Reading through these wealthy, powerful people’s glib statements on privacy, one begins to suspect that what they’re really talking about is other people’s privacy, not their own. If you exist within a personal Green Zone of private jets, fenced off hideaways, and firewalls maintained by the country’s best law firms and PR agencies, it’s hardly a surprise that you’d eventually come to see privacy more as a privilege than a right. And if your company happens to make its money by mining personal data, well, that’s all the more reason to convince yourself that other people’s privacy may not be so important.

CES 2010: technology and a horrible bum disease

I’ve been following the more interesting developments at this week’s CES gadget frenzy, and naturally I’ve been writing about them too. First up, comparing Steve Ballmer to anal unpleasantness.

Every day, Apple shareholders wake up and thank their lucky stars that their chosen firm’s CEO isn’t Steve Ballmer. The Gordon Brown of tech could make even the Apple Tablet as desirable as some horrible bum disease.

Also, how tech can make teenagers’ lives miserable.

Parental controls are in everything. They’re in your Sky box, in your games console. They’re in Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. If they want to, your folks can even prevent you from doing anything vaguely interesting or useful on your iPhone in case you might see a word such as “tits”. And now they’re in your car.

Isn’t that awful?

Not to mention, Why Apple and Google should show at CES.

What we’d like to see is for Google and Apple to embrace CES, to join in the fun, to remember that consumer electronics are first and foremost about entertainment.

It’d be brilliant – the tech Glastonbury, and we don’t mean one of the rubbish years where everyone pretends to like Tom Jones.

They could heckle Steve Ballmer, deliver jaw-dropping keynotes and wake up in strange rooms with Steve Jobs missing, a baby in the cupboard and Mike Tyson’s tiger in the bathroom.

Last but not least: why comparing Android versus iPhone to PC versus Mac is, well, a great big load of shite.

“Technology tastemakers are thrilled with the platform’s open-ness”, Blodget asserts, waggling an accusing finger at Big Bad Apple and its treatment of developers. That’s irrelevant. Ogg Vorbis is open and thoroughly approved by technology tastemakers. When was the last time anybody without a beard ripped their CDs into that format?

And while risible, Apple’s treatment of the odd developer is only of interest to a few developers.

Is Android pretty nifty? Will it gain market share? Will a few iPhone refuseniks buy Nexus Ones? Yes, definitely and undoubtedly. Is the iPhone about to tank? Don’t be silly.

Facebook and Google simply don’t get privacy

Me, Techradar:

What they don’t seem to understand is that online privacy is like curtains: you don’t block the windows because you’re running a meth lab or a brothel in your house; you block them because you don’t want weirdoes peering through the window when you’re watching TV Burp.

Would UK bloggers get the same support as Iranian ones?

Web freedom is easy to support when it doesn’t affect your bottom line…

God bless the internet. As shocking events in Iran continue to unfold, bloggers, Twitter users and social networkers are helping oppressed Iranians fight the power.

Even Google is helping… But if the bloggers were in the UK, the newspapers and tech firms wouldn’t be on their side. If there’s money to be made, new media and old media alike will happily help Goliath give David a battering.

Ding dong, the database is dead. Isn’t it?

Jacqui Smith is scrapping the uber-database that would monitor everything we do online. Isn’t she?

In an unexpected press conference yesterday, Doctor Evil admitted that his unpopular plans for “sharks with frickin’ laser beams” were “extreme” and too expensive, so the entire programme is being scrapped.

However, when journalists examined the details of the policy, they discovered that Doctor Evil’s programme is still going ahead.

Sharks are still being fitted with laser beams, but Doctor Evil has renamed the beams as “big torches.”

Owning a camera doesn’t make you a criminal

Me on security guards, snappers and deleting photos…

Part of the problem is overzealous people in uniform, whether they’re security guards or serving police officers. The Metropolitan Police’s crazed anti-terrorism adverts (PDF), which brand photographers as potential bombers, don’t exactly help. But there’s also a problem with the law.

The idea that Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act makes photographing the police illegal is pure fantasy. It doesn’t mention photos at all. Rather, it says that it’s illegal to gather or publish information about the police or armed forces that is “likely to be useful” to a mad bomber, foreign spy or Osama Bin Laden.

With pretty much everything in the world linked to terrorism these days – Icelandic banks’ assets were frozen under anti-terrorism legislation, while anti-terrorism surveillance powers have also been used to crack down on such threats to life and liberty as dog crap and fly-tippers – then it’s easy to see how that phrase can be misinterpreted, either by accident or by design.