Facebook and Google: Information Sharing

These are the two most notable offenders, of course, but there are hundreds of other major sites gathering information from every keystroke you make.  Yesterday it was revealed that Facebook was conducting experiments on mood and feeling by altering user feeds, giving some people good news, others bad.  Fie on you, Zuckerberg.

Most sites claim that they monitor our posts and even emails (thanks gmail) in order to give us more quality in the ads they present us.  Preposterous.  I don't want any ads, thank you very much.  Their explanation implies they are providing a service.  Right.

The fact is that hundreds of billions of bits of information are being stored on the American people and those in other countries.  A recent NBC story reported that large companies house this data and are reluctant to even have their names known.  1984 has arrived, people, albeit a little bit late.

As for me, I intend to post things on Facebook to confuse their algorithms: screaming zebras, Russian clowns, etc.  We could create a massive headache for the people tracking us and change policy, but apparently most of us don't care as long as we can post the pictures of our kitties on Facebook.

Cat Spaulding

Facebook: A Mixed Review

Thus far I've resisted the social networking trend. I'm probably the only woman who is not "friended" to all 259 members of her high school graduating class. So many of them are worth forgetting. Maybe most, in fact. My sister, however, lives and dies by Facebook. I'm not sure why since she only comments on the status of about ten of her 577 friends. A guy recently told me that for males, getting a large number of friends is rather like a contest, like chugging beer or like rams savagely butting their horns together. It's a testosterone thing, or at least that's what I've been told by hunky "Facebookers" (an interesting word now entering the language).

I'm not sure why I would need to know on a minute to minute basis that my best friend is entering the grocery store, feeling the melons, or watching a clean-up on aisle seven. I once coaxed my sister to post "I am still breathing" as her status. Writing on her wall, dozens of people expressed grave concern about her health. Did she have respiratory distress? Was she smothering? (It's unlikely she would be able to type while being smothered.)

All this having been said, it's benign as long as you don't click on the wrong link and get phished. It's the cyber equivalent of chatting to your neighbor across the fence while taking in the laundry. It keeps people talking, and that's a good thing in these mean and perilous times. I have to wonder, however, when we're going to reach the saturation point. Perhaps one day we'll simply crawl into our PCs while the real world, vegetable and mineral, just decays. It will be up to Keanu Reeves (a.k.a. Neo) to enter the Matrix and save us. Meow.