Facebook is being evil too
Sep 4th, 2008 by Micheal
I just did a blog post about Google being evil. Well, Facebook is being evil too. Again.
First I’ll start off with this story, by the Washington Times. It is about how Facebook Ads Target You Where It Hurts. Rachel Beckman, the author, goes on to say how Facebook delivered targeted ads insisting that she had a “muffin top” and she needed to lose weight. Needless to say, she was taken aback by this. I would be too. Facebook knows a lot about us, as she goes on to say, because we tell Facebook so much about our personal lives. Our age, our relationship status, our friends, our activities, and so on.
Facebook advertisers have no problem offending people it seems. Below are a series of ads showing in my profile.
As you can see, highly targeted ads. Facebook knows I’m single, knows I don’t want to be, and they laugh at me. They display painful ads. Yes, painful. Like rubbing salt in and pouring lemon juice in at the same time. As you can see from the 6th ad, they boast about their targeted ads. My complaint in the Thumbs down? “Other-Nice guys finish last.” Sometimes, depending on the ad, I’ll say “Other-100% guarantee that these girls will talk to me?” Why? Because I’m tired of having these ads shoved in my face. Facebook, right?
So I’m going to go with a little experiment. I’m going to set my profile from “Single” to “Married.” No, I’m not actually married. But I’m getting tired of being painfully reminded that I’m not.
All the more reason to stay out of that sort of site.
I’ve never joined any of the “social networking” sites… not even the more “professional” versions like linked-in and so on. I find it interesting that some folks even seem to get offended about when I decline their invitation to join their network.
adblock for firefox!
I don’t think adblock stops them from being evil. In-fact their CIO (or similar position) flaunted the fact that facebook will be evil, and the masses will like it.
This is why I took all my information off facebook last year, they were being evil. But as it’s a social medium, like all social mediums, it has a lot of momentum, and it’s difficult to make people jump ship (and maybe use e-mail, or rather reply to e-mails I send them over facebook wall posts).
Recently Richard Stallman warned us about the cloud, this is only the start. Keep out of the commercial capitalist cloud and keep in control. The industry is unregulated, of course they are going to abuse user trust.