sang the Guitar Man from Central Park, David Ippolito. While he was worried about the stupidity of the kind of exchanges that take place on Facebook, there is another aspect in which facebook tends to show absolute absurdity
I am referring to the silly interface changes that Facebook seems to love. Only recently, I opted for the new profile. Now, I can still see the friend requests in the same old place. But when I click there, this is what I see:
Try blocking Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. This is what happens:
And nothing beats the useless apps that come up on the damned website. What is really sad is that any app you use has full access to your profile and all your information, even the ones which you may have marked as private. Not only are you at risk if you use apps, but also when your friend uses apps. This is scary because any cyber criminal could be out there creating apps with which he may harvest loads of personal information, possibly to steal people's identities. And the annoying part is that all information is visible to all apps by default, unless you explicitly opt out. Now, this is really bad. I mean, when Google Buzz came up with a public by default kind of privacy policy, they had to commit $8.5 million to an independent fund. In case of Facebook, very few people know about the risks that apps pose.
Indeed, Facebook is such a dumb and risky platform that I had opted out of Facebook and remained that way for around 3 months. Now, I simply use Facebook as a means to publicise this blog. Those three months were a period of bliss because suddenly, I had all the time that used to be spent on Facebook watching stupid status updates every hour, or blocking the number of applications that my friends used.
Go on, try giving Facebook the boot. Deactivate your account, that you may resume it anytime. But do try and stay off Facebook for some months. You'll love it.
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