George W Bush got away with millions of private, domestic phone records thanks to the botched Patriot Act and several tel-com companies who were more beholden to the corrupt republican president than their own customers' privacy concerns.
Now - is Facebook pulling the same stunt? Is Mark Zuckerberg positioning himself to be the all-powerful ruler over hundreds of thousands of personal profiles, photo albums and other information that the popular Facebook website has become saturated with?
Yesterday's NY Observer drew Facebook members' attention to a little known and recent change to the Facebook Terms of Use Agreement which states essentially that your photos, contact info, personal status and everything you've ever put into your profile ... belongs to Zuckerberg. And even if you delete your profile, he keeps it to do with it what he wishes.
Zuckerberg
Enormous databases to online merchants and government organizations are a like a fallen Wooly Mammoth in a desert to a swarm of hungry carion. It saddens me to think Facebook may become just one more phony outlet where innocents citizens think they're communing with their fellows when all they are really doing is depositing their profile DNA for greedy companies and corrupt government entities to pore over them when they wish.
Yes, finding out that GW Bush had been illegally obtaining my personal info from companies like AT&T and Verizon without a warrent has left me a little on the over-sensitized side - some might even say slightly conspiracy theory bent - my mother would say paranoid. But until I know stories like this have gotten the attention of someone who can offer some real oversight, and some reversals of past Patriot Act corruption, I am in no mood to just put myself out there like that.
I've deleted all of my Facebook photos without actually deleting my account in todo. My reason for doing that is the pitiful and probably unfounded hope that maybe if I give the Facebook Servers time to mirror my account as an account with no photos, I can then delete the account down the road and they will have obtained nothing from me but a name and an email address ... the same they get everytime I buy something from Amazon.
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