Real Names
[HR][/HR] Facebook is not your friend. Its "real name" policy is enough reason to refuse to use it, but there is so much more nastiness in Facebook.
[HR][/HR] Facebook makes a practice of
asking its users to rat on their friends who use aliases.
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Censorship
Facebook practices heavy censorship
Facebook wants to present itself as a
virtual town square … a censored one.
[HR][/HR]
Facebook does censorship of photos based on prudish criteria.
[HR][/HR] Facebook has a
history of blocking the posting of links about certain controversial political issues.
Facebook censored an ACLU post about censorship.
[HR][/HR] Facebook
deleted a statement by a human rights group, then said that was a mistake.
That Facebook invited the group to post the statement again — instead of undoing the deletion — demonstrates arrogance.
However, the problem here goes deeper. It is not good for human rights groups' (or anyone's) statements to be posted using a platform where statements are censored.
[HR][/HR] Facebook
censorship guidelines have been leaked. They include political censorship catering to various countries that do not respect freedom of speech.
[HR][/HR] Facebook has
censored political satire aimed at the UK unemployment agency and associated organizations, apparantly at the request of a target of the satire.
[HR][/HR] Facebook
deleted a photo of two men kissing, which was used to support a kiss-in in a pub that had shown bias against gays.
The person who posted it thinks that Facebook is not anti-gay, but rather than it is quick to censor whatever someone complains about.
While it might seem that the former would be worse, I think the latter makes Facebook really dangerous. Don't use Facebook as a substitute for your own web site!
Facebook
censored a photo of two men kissing, posted as a protest against India's criminalization of homosexuality. [HR][/HR] For more see
here.
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Privacy
[HR][/HR] The NSA
tracks Americans' social networks, and Facebook is just one of its sources.
Thus, if you talk about your friends in Facebook, you're ratting on them. If you say that you saw John and Arthur, you tell the NSA that John knows Arthur. If John and Arthur are dissidents, or journalists, your information will help the government suppress dissent or journalism.
Facebook's mobile app
snoops on SMS messages.
[HR][/HR] When users log in to a site through Facebook, Facebook
gives the site access to lots of information about the user.
If this is what a site demands from you, you should not touch it anyway!
[HR][/HR]
Facebook carefully studies all the text that its users type in and then don't submit.
[HR][/HR] Pages that contain Facebook "like" buttons enable Facebook to track visitors to those pages.
Facebook tracks Internet users that see "like" buttons, even users who never visited facebook.com and never click on those buttons.
The ACLU has a way of enabling users to click a Facebook "like" button, which avoids this problem. Its pages have a link called "like us on Facebook" that leads to a Facebook page where it is possible to push a "like" button for the ACLU. But if you don't follow that link, Facebook gets no information about your visit to the ACLU page.
This page gives details
about how much Facebook tracks users' browsing, which applies even to users that don't have Facebook accounts.
[HR][/HR] Facebook has turned on automatic face recognition on photos.
Facebook says that it only suggests identifications for faces in photos for people who are the used's friends. However, it might run the algorithm over every photo posted and not publicly announce the results.
I ask people not to post photos of me on Facebook.
[HR][/HR]
Many things can be determined about a Facebook used, with pretty good accuracy, from the used's published list of "likes".
If you do as I do, and reject Facebook, you are safe from this form of snooping.
How can we get the news items that interest us, without telling a server what criterion to use? Simple: download lists of items, and have software on our own machine decide which articles to show. This software can fetch additional articles (which it doesn't actually show us) just to create a false trail.
[HR][/HR] Facebook asks its users to provide their entire list of
other people's email addresses.
This by itself is surveillance of those other people, but Facebook uses it to go further and try to guess the relationships of people who are not Facebook users.
That information must be worth some money to companies. It is surely worth money to the secret police of any country that isn't democratic enough.
However, principal wrong here is not that Facebook can guess which non-users know you or me. It is that Facebook collects information from its users about whether they know you or me.
I think we can formulate the principle that any social network that asks its members for information about other people is abusive.
[HR][/HR] Facebook apps have access to that used's information — and the users' "friends'" information, too. Thus, if you make the mistake of using Facebook, even if you let a company access your data,
any of your "friends" can give the company access to your data.
[HR][/HR] Innocent-seeming text posted on Facebook could cause you lots of trouble, due to development of
systems to deduce things about you.
[HR][/HR] Facebook has automatically pushed users' @facebook.com email addresses (which they never asked for) into the
contact lists in other people's phones.
The lesson here is that it is a fundamental mistake to trust a company such as Facebook to give anyone data about you. It will give them the data it wants them to have, not the data you want to give them.
[HR][/HR] For more see
here.
[HR][/HR][HR][/HR]
Ads
[HR][/HR] [HR][/HR] Facebook exploits its users by
conscripting them for ads.
Facebook settled a lawsuit by promising users will be able to
"limit" this use of their names and photos in ads shown to other users. However, since this is "opt-out", by default users will still be exploited. What's more,
it may not even be a complete opt-out.
Facebook will no longer allow users to decline to let their names be
used in advertisements. More than ever, Facebook is really Suckerberg.
In addition, Facebook secretly collects users' phone numbers. The article says it is not clear why. Perhaps it's a favor for the NSA.
[HR][/HR] Did the vegetarian Facebook used really "like" McDonalds, or did Facebook make it up? In fact,
Facebook invents phony "likes", and worse, falsely suggests people liked specific text that they had never even seen.
[HR][/HR] Facebook sends political messages as
coming from people who have clicked Like buttons.
Facebook recently settled a lawsuit, promising to stop a very similar practice involving ads, but these political messages are not considered "ads" and Facebook continues to send them.
[HR][/HR][HR][/HR]
Psychological Harm
[HR][/HR] Number of friends on Facebook
measures narcissism.
Facebook is designed to get users
addicted to vanity.
One used writes that Facebook led her to be in love with "the projection of [her] own desired life".
[HR][/HR] Social networks, for lonely people, may only show them
how lonely they are.
A study found that heavy use by Facebook
tends to make people sad, independent of how the used felt at the start of the study.
The study
eliminated the hypothesis that people used Facebook more because they were sadder to begin with.
This is not yet proof, but given so many other reasons to avoid Facebook, why not take this precaution?
[HR][/HR] Allowing yourself to be used frequently by Facebook
promotes eating disorders.
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Taxes
Facebook is a
tax dodger.
Of course, it's not the only one, but that is no excuse.
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Miscellaneous
[HR][/HR] It is very important for you personally to
refuse to use Facebook,
especially if some of your friends do (or might), because that's how you influence them, for good or for ill.
[HR][/HR]
Unfriend Facebook now — you are its product, not its customer.
[HR][/HR] Facebook says that a used
can't have Facebook's data about him, because it's a trade secret.
[HR][/HR] A German regulator says that
Facebook's face recognition is illegal.
[HR][/HR]
A convicted blackmailer who helped Putin
crush independent media in Russia now owns a large stake in Facebook.
[HR][/HR] Facebook tries to discourage users
from visiting other web sites.
(This article uses the word "content" to refer to published works. I think that is a bad practice since that term disparages the works.
See.)
[HR][/HR] It appears Facebook spontaneously sends phone messages to people in India who have had no connection with Facebook.
This user is trying to find out why.
[HR][/HR] Facebook has put an outrageous
trademark claim on the word "book" into its terms of service.
To be dependent on Facebook, or any other specific company you could not replace with another, is to make yourself vulnerable to unbounded legal aggression. Don't be a fool — unfriend Facebook today rather than accept these terms.
[HR][/HR] A credit agency in Germany plans to evaluate people's creditworthiness by who their “
friends” are on Facebook.
The lesson is that we should make sure that no activities collect information about lots of people's social networks.
[HR][/HR] Facebook is attempting to
gouge companies and web sites that use it to keep in touch with their customers.
The attitude of this criticism is too narrowly commercial for me to sympathize fully with it, and I expect that Facebook will reduce this charge so as to avoid driving these customers away. I am also repelled by the shallowness that leads to thinking that Facebook in April 2012 was good merely because it aided their commercial goals.
Nonetheless, this demonstrates the arrogant way Facebook treats anyone that deals with it, which is a reason not to be one of them.
[HR][/HR] Facebook:
the most congenitally dishonest company in America.
