More reasons to hate Facebook. Like you needed them.
Guess what, somebody just bought and sold you online. You weren’t worth much as an individual. 25 cents to be exact. But when you’re sold as a bundle with a bunch of other slaves you make someone a tidy profit. Especially Mark Zuckerberg, but we’ll get to that later.
There’s a woman named Rochelle Peachy, she’s the founder of a dating website, and she recently admitted in an interview that she was approached by a company. This company goes around buying and selling peoples profiles from various websites. Flipping them for a profit. This company wanted to buy member profiles from her. She said they offered her 250 bucks for 1,000 profiles and 1,250 bucks for 5,000. Now she could have made some easy money. She said she has 10,000 members and is growing every day. But this woman’s wouldn’t have it. She says the people on her site are genuinely looking for real love and she just wouldn’t do it. But she added just how amazed and afraid we would all be if we knew where our pictures could turn up. She used the word afraid.
Facebook, not so honorable. They’ll sell your information to a Mexican crime lord if they’re the highest bidder.
There are sucker pulls on Facebook as well. These pull on your greatest weaknesses and curiosities and lure you in like there was pig ring in your nose. The latest one came after Osama bin Laden was killed. What some company did was use fake shots and still frames claiming to be from a video of bin Laden’s death. If a person clicked on the link, instead of taking them to a video, it directed them to a survey they were instructed to complete before viewing. And guess what, after you finished the survey there was no video. And of course the scammer who set all this up made money every time some morbidly curious and gullible dipshit fell for this crap. Making money off of people’s stupidity has got to be the easiest money of all. Because there’s just so many stupid people out there.
Also, do you know what EXIF data is? Didn’t think so. EXIF data is a hidden pocket of metadata that includes information about the type of camera used to take the photo, the settings for the imager and sometimes even exact GPS coordinates on where the photograph was taken. And it’s embedded in every photo you post online. I know this because Gregory Perry knows this. He’s the Chief Executive Officer for a company that provides VMware certification and training. According to Gregory Perry, if you combine that technology with facial recognition, Facebook has more power than any intelligence agency existing. It provides Facebook, and anyone they provide the data to, an extremely accurate and comprehensive imagery intelligence. Gregory Perry has went on the record to refer to Facebook as “Dangerous”. By the way, because you should know, Facebook has already implemented facial recognition on your account without telling you. It automates photo tagging. What that means is the machine of Facebook can determine which of your friends' photos you are featured in even before they do. Even if they didn’t tag you themselves. If the thought of that makes you uncomfortable, and I surely hope it does, here’s a quick tutorial on how to turn it off:
- Click on Account in the upper right corner of your Facebook page.
- Choose “Account Settings” in the menu that drops down.
- Click on “Manage” in the “Privacy” field of your Account Settings page.
- At the bottom of the page, click on “Customize Settings” and once there, look for an option called “Suggest photos of me to friends”.
- Under that option, click on “Edit Settings” and turn the feature from Enabled to Disabled.
Oh but it gets thicker. Because of people being insidious, scrupulous, greedy mother fuckers it will always get thicker.
There are organized online extortionists that seduce men, women and children alike on Facebook. Through the site they seduce people to follow links to child pornography, pay for solicited prostitution or simply engage them into incriminating carnal behavior in a recorded video call. Then they turn around and blackmail your sorry ass. And in the likelihood you weren’t aware, there’s a website called Tineye. In their own words, TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version. Well apparently these blackmailers and extortionists crawl Facebook downloading as many pics as possible, run them through Tineye or a similar program, and look for results that come from dating/swinger sites. If one of their targets is married or a celebrity or holds a public office it makes them vulnerable to blackmail. The word being used to describe this activity is Epidemic.
Never mind that fact that there are literally thousands of profiles created every week that are actually links to human trafficking websites featuring the sale of men, women and children. Or the fact that countless pedophiles creep around Facebook luring children for their own desires or to entrap them into the sex trade.
And to think the governments and politicians are worried about Wikileaks…
The sad part is you agreed to all this. That terms of agreement you didn’t even so much as gloss over before you agreed to it so you could have the privilege of having a profile on Facebook, it says you gave up the rights to your privacy and that ultimately they can do with your information as they wish. By the way, when Facebook sells their stockpile of profiles repeatedly to various customers, they make a hundred million dollars…over and over again.
Now some will argue that Facebook helped facilitate the revolutions in the Middle East. Well guess what, any social website could have done that. They just happen to be the one right now because we’ve allowed it to be the dominant site. But Facebook is not the answer. All it is now is a marketing tool. We need something different. In fact the ideal thing to do would be to open several sister websites solely for the purpose of social and global solidarity and creating an online community for individuals around the world. For keeping one another informed and up to date. A place people can post current and immediate events by text posts or video. Fuck politics. Fuck the advertisements. No bullshit.
A website for the people, by the people.
