Facebook Privacy Policy: Stop Using Facebook

If you want information to be private, then do not share it.

The New York Times writing an article about the recent changes to Facebook's Privacy Policy is the kind of thing which evidences a fundamental flaw in the human species. This is not dumb. This is not stupid. This surpasses any known measurement of retardation. This is simply insanity, plain and simple.

Facebook updated its privacy policy the result of which is that now the default setting is that all information is public. To make information private, one need navigate and click through 170 user settings, which is inconvenient. But to make the process simpler, the New York Times provides a flow chart which can be found here. That's right; in case you are too god damned stupid to navigate Facebook settings there is a chart.

Also, people are bitching about the length of Facebook's Privacy policy. It has grown from 1,004 pages in 2005 to 5,830 words in 2010. Apparently Facebook users hate reading, which you'd never guess if you spent any time on Facebook.

So why is this all insanity? Why does this anger up the blood? Well, there is the obvious problem of people sharing information they do not want to be shared, but that is just Cognitive dissonance. No, the larger issue, the feature most indicative of insanity, is the following mentality: I should be able to share any information I want on Facebook and be able to entirely control who has access to this information, because X.

The problem, you may note, is that THERE IS NO X; there is no foundation for an argument of why one ought be able to control access to one's Facebook account. People may want it, and people may yell about it, but there is no actual justification for the position, no foundation for the argument. Which, really, is the problem with any "ought" claim, unless you are Kant.

The problem with Facebook privacy arguments is that they truly make no god damned sense. A Facebook user is tossing personal, sometimes private, information onto some random server owned by other people, maintained by other people, and controlled by other people. The Facebook user then claims a right to ownership of the information, maintenance of the information, and control of the information. This is insanity given that the Facebook website, servers, etc. are all owned by Facebook, Inc., a privately owned company and are not owned by you, the idiot posting drunken, incriminating, pictures of yourself on the tubal interwebs.

I mean, really. Were Facebook, Inc. so inclined then, tomorrow, they could e-mail those pictures of you doing Jell-O shots out of your boyfriend's asshole to your boss and grandmother because, well, fuck you. And there really isn't anything you could do about it. Which, perhaps, is a point which need be considered.

There are numerous criticisms to be made about Facebook. But I think the more sensible criticism is to be directed at Facebook users. If you want to share a picture of your cat with everyone in the world because Lord Pussington is just so gosh-darn cute? Then go nuts. But do not post sensitive, personal, private information onto a server you do not own, to be accessed via a social networking site you do not control, and then get your knickers in a twist over privacy issues.

You lost any claim to privacy when you shared the information.