facebook

More reason not to join social networking sites: How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free.

This article doesn't even get to the core of the badness in my paranoid brain though: What are the possible implications of allowing a site or any number of sites access to a coordinated list of your friends and associates? What are the privacy implications, and what happens if a more fascistic government takes control and demands the records of one of these companies? What if the company goes under and the sleazy execs sells the data to even sleazier execs who then mine the data for all it's worth to sell you stuff and sell your data to other companies? I'm sure I'm not even touching the surface, frankly.

My recommendation, and what I'm trying to implement myself: control your own data. Use client-side applications as much of the time as possible (i.e. read your mail with Thunderbird on your own machine with mail hosted by a smaller ISP vs. logging into a web site to do so...still problematic but there are also good hosts out there who are into these political/economic issues too), sign up for as few memberships as possible online (check out http://www.bugmenot.com/), don't sign into any Google services when you are searching, don't sign up for any social networking sites, chatting on major services is problematic...don't trust big corporations (or small ones) to do the right thing with your data. They don't love you, they just want money.

I'm not so great at putting my own advice into practice yet, and it's counter to the trend in the biz, but I'm realizing it's where we need to go. Please give it some thought. I'm not just being a luddite here; I've been working as a web developer and sysadmin for almost a decade and I know how incompetent and unscrupulous people can be.