Hometown Computer

Crosspost from www.benjaminleach.com

This is a response to http://blog.brokep.com/2010/04/24/facebook-owns-us/

In this post, Brokep (full disclosure, former admin of The Pirate Bay and founder of Flattr) states that Facebook has gained too much power over not only our online lives, but offline as well. We put our friends, and those we once brushed by in a crowded hallway, into neat little groups. We invite them to events in real life through those groups, and if Facebook decides one of those friends are no longer worthy of belonging to Facebook, they are deleted, both from your online and offline interactions, since  you can no longer find them, and may not even know they’re missing. They don’t get invited to class reunions, business parties, or concerts their friends are putting on, just because they violated some vague term of use, and can’t even get a reason from the admins at Facebook explaining their new-found status as an outcast.

Perhaps we do need to find a new social network, one that is completely unregulated, unfiltered, and unfettered. Perhaps though, if we attempt such a project, it would not be a place we’d want our children to end up. One only needs to look at sites such as 4chan.org (inappropriate content warning here) to see what happens when we impose digital anarchy. Such a site would have to have some sort of structure. Perhaps Facebook takes that structure too far. Perhaps an account should be flagged as inappropriate before it is deleted, and require a disclaimer page between yourself and that persons profile in order to view it. I’m not sure this would be enough though.

This isn’t about Facebook though. I’m not sure that what they are doing goes quite far enough sometimes. The company I’d like to talk about though, is Google. If Facebook can be accused of being a monopoly, what then, is Google? We use them to host and index our email (Gmail). We find directions with Google Maps. We find websites with the search engine. We run our phones on their software (Android). We use them to tell us who is visiting our website and from where (Analytics). We advertise with them (AdSense). We save our documents we’re working with online with them (Google Docs). We share projects with coworkers through them (Wave). We do research through them (Google Scholar). We save our medical records online with them (Google Health). We use their social network (Orkut). We watch videos through them (YouTube). We blog with them (Blogger). We update our friends through them (Buzz).

All this information Google collects, our medical history, our call log, our physical location, what we look at online, who we talk to, what we work on, what we think, and so on, is far more dangerous for one company to have than anything Facebook can do. Google’s motto is “Don’t be Evil.” I’m afraid that their business model by its very nature goes against their motto. They are unable to not be evil, the very storage of every piece of information they can get their hands on, with absolutely no time line for deletion, is evil. It is too much power for one person, or one company to have. They cannot keep all this indefinitely. If you want to talk about a monopoly, and a site that is dangerous to trust with your information, look no further than the front page of your browser.