I recently had a conversation with someone about the value of Facebook as a company. The website itself is probably worth very little, the value however, lies in the sheer billions of data people eagerly and freely supply about themselves and their friends each day through posts, photos, and profile updates. Given that this was on my mind, I was excited to read a blog post by Mark Zuckberg, founder of the popular social networking site titled "Improving your ability to share and connect."
"Sharing information..." is that just a fancy way of them saying, please supply us with even more personal data that we can one day sell? Before I even read the blog entry, I decided to do a search for the word "private." It came up once in the first paragraph.
It's amazing what Facebook did in terms of connecting people, allowing them to share things for free and interact with friends in this online space. Once the focus shifted to "news feeds," I got worried. Why do we care so much about what someone is doing every second of the day? Or care to share that information ourselves? I personally think posting sonograms is crossing the line...
I worry about privacy and the volumes of data under the control of Mark Zuckberg, yet, like all other facebook users, I freely post my photos and check update status at least 10 times a day and tell people what I'm up to.
Today, it's all about connectivity. I'm not sure I would be as close with all my friends that have moved away over the years if it weren't for social networking. It's making the world a lot smaller and Facebook is leading the way through the mapping of these connections.
Will this data dumping and over sharing on social networking sites become detrimental to our society?
We've created a monster!
15 years ago
