Facebook just bought Friendfeed. If you haven't heard of Friendfeed, give this interesting article a look. If you haven't heard of Facebook, and don't have an account, you may be among the lucky ones who could still preserve a modicum of privacy in tomorrow's world.
So, what does the Facebook-Friendfeed deal mean? Writer Chadwick Matlin begins his piece with one baldly intimidating statement: "Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online," and ends his piece with another: "[Facebook bought Friendfeed]...so it could own you." In between, he speculates breathlessly about Facebook's plans to become the aggregator of all social media. The promise is user convenience, not having to track or manage separately all your links, posts, and feeds to and from a proliferating array of blogs, Facebook, Digg, Twitter. The threat, about which no one seems particularly concerned just yet, is to individual privacy.
By itself, the Facebook news doesn't seem like much, and Matlin may be incorrect in his speculation; but generally, the push is on for these seemingly user-friendly sites to collect more and more information about the individuals who use them. Aggregation of all that information -- not just contact info but your interests, photos, friends, associations, and the like -- can tell anyone who cares to ask (and who can pay for it) a lot about you. Some random observations:
- Tagged.com is one of the worst. Avoid it. It's a phishing expedition disguised as social networking, and getting involved with it (as I inadvertently did when an acquaintance sent some photos) will magically quintuple your spam e-mail within days. (They're now on my "blocked" list.)
- Facebook didn't originally seem too intrusive, and does allow you to decide what information you want to provide. But the trend to grab more is evident in a recent twist which requires a "confirmation" process involving giving up your cell phone number (something I don't do easily) and other data before you can post a comment on the pages of organizations of which you're a "fan."
- The venerable E-bay collects immense amounts of information, some of which can be justified to protect the financial and personal security of buyers and sellers. But did you know, as I discovered by accident, that as a party to a transaction, you can access other bidders' buying history on the site, seeing everything they bought or bid on, and the prices paid? Can you think of a reason for that? I can't. In fact it seems to contradict the premise of a free auction; it's not information you would have in a real auction. (Incidentally, you can't do the same on the German version of E-bay, because German law protects individual privacy far more stringently.)
- Your health insurance company may be selling your prescriptions and medical history even as you read this, to anyone who wants to pay for it. If they're not selling it, they're failing to protect that information from data miners which do.
Now, I realize none of this may concern you in the least. As always, everyone has to make his/her own choices regarding how much personal information it's appropriate to dole out, and to whom. Actually, I'm pretty free with my own information, except that I do keep my cell phone number pretty close because I don't want it ringing at me constantly with nuisance messages. But one thing is certain: the more that's out there, and the less you can compartmentalize it, the greater the likelihood of a data compromise you may not wish for.
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