Fire, Brimstone and Facebook.
Google has always been known for its mantra of “don’t be evil”, but in the past week Facebook has appeared as a force prepared to bulldoze through any sort of similar thinking by introducing “Open Graph”.
I’m going to make it simple. Very soon you will see elements of Facebook all across in the internet. You will see Facebook “Walls” on blogs, the Facebook commenting system on news sites, and the “Like” button absolutely everywhere. With this, Facebook hopes to weave itself into the very foundations of the internet and become the de facto platform for any online social interaction. With nearly 500 million users around the world, Facebook is beginning to flex their muscles and show just what they can do with the largest social graph in the world.
What does it mean for you? It means that you will be able to share anything you find with all of your friends on Facebook. You will have the ability to send anything and everything to Facebook. While this may look good and sound convenient, there is a bigger issue at play.
If Open Graph turns out to be successful, Facebook’s tentacles will creep into every web page you visit. Sites will begin to live and breathe through the elements of Facebook they choose to implement. Everything you do could eventually go through Facebook.
As Google grew in size and popularity in the early 2000’s, concerns over personal privacy flared as the search engine began to track everyone’s movements through the internet. It was worrying because one company new where you were and where you had been. Google took the hint from their concerned users and changed their privacy policy to only keep this data for 18 months.
Facebook on the other hand has had a shocking history of dealing with personal privacy. Last year Facebook added a clause to their terms of service which handed all ownership of everything you had on the site, over to Facebook, photos and all. Public outcry over the blatant breach of trust lead to Facebook quickly removing this clause.
With such a sketchy privacy history it is impossible to know exactly how Facebook with deal with your personal information. And when you think about it, they’re not just collecting impersonal information like Google does, like your IP address, they’re collecting the comments you make, the photos you post, the people you know, the stuff that you like. It creates a privacy scenario much more involved than Google’s and one which has the potential for greater damage if misused. Google only knew your internet history, Facebook knows exactly who you are.
Open Social has the ability to change the way you and I connect throughout the web. But along with it come some serious question about how much power and control we want to hand over to one company, the company who knows everything about us. Keep this in mind: Google has the motto “don’t be evil”, Facebook doesn’t.
