DIYbanter - View Single Post - OT Big Brother is watching us on Facebook

HeyBub[_3_]

wrote:
On Wed, 02 May 2012 13:09:53 -0500, gonjah wrote:

I mentioned one of my crowns fell out on Facebook yesterday and today
I'm getting "affordable dentist" ads on Facebook. I find that a
little creepy.

And who is forcing you to use Facebook?

Tell me this, is there anything on there worth spending even 10
minutes on it? Do you really care what someone ate for breakfast,
when they picked up the kids from school, or how much they paid for a
purse? FB is not only signing up for the biggest spyware ever used
online, but it's ****ing boring as hell.

One and a half years ago, I signed up for it, under an alias, just to
check it out. There was absolutely nothing on it that I found worth
the EXTENSIVE amount of time it takes to use it, because things were
constantly repeated, so that I was getting daily "important
read-me's". Turned out it was the same useless crap I read yesterday.

But that's minor compared to the real problem. I began to take the FB
cookies on my computer and run them thru a hex editor. Guess what,
everytime I was on FB, it was reading my hard drive. Listing all the
software I had installed, and other data. I have to mention that I
was not running a common, modern system, since I run windows98 (by
choice). I also dont use the common software, I have mostly freeware
and obsolete programs. But FB was tracking all of it. I also dont
keep financial data or anything important in the sense of tracking
me, but I have a lot of storage data, meaning collections of photos,
clipart, music, videos, etc. So, really they were not getting much
anything of value, yet they had in the cookies listed that I have a
pre 1990's version of a paint program, along with a newer version of
the same.

After a couple weeks, I killed the account, or tried, because you can
not just remove a FB account. You can only suspend it, meaning it's
still there. However I did my best to destroy it before suspending
it, by removing pictures, and anything I had posted that could be
removed.

But it gets WORSE! I soon found that even without a FB account, FB
can track your computer when any website has a FB logo on their page,
which is probably 95% or more of all websites these days. Since
then, I've added around 30 entries in my HOSTS file to block FB, and
have an addon for Firefox that blocks FB. I have other blockers
installed that block Twitter and other social network sites.

FB is a disease that has infected the internet, and it appears that
in a year or two, FB will completely destroy the internet. If you
have not noticed, almost all the once active newsgroups are dead.
The few that remain in use (like this one), is slower and has a lot
more idiots and off topic posts. Guess why? Because all the younger
people only know FB as the place to discuss things, most dont even
know what a newsgroup is. And what has the web become? It's mostly
just a giant commercial now.

I deal with several bands (music). The music types vary from rock,
oldies, modern, country, etc. A few years ago, any band that was
getting jobs, had a website. These days when you ask them for a
website, 9 out of 10 of them shove a FB link in my face. I keep
telling them "that's not a webpage". And when the music these bands
play, appeals to an older crowd, they are losing customers at their
shows, because it seems it's only the older people who sometimes
refuse to use FB. The young crowd thinks FB is the greatest thing on
earth.

I will never use FB again, even if someone tried to pay me to use it.

I honestly believe that FB will completely destroy the internet within
the next few years. Of course if enough people "SAID NO" to FB, and
even boycotted it, this could change. But I dont see that happening.
FB is a disease that is spreading faster than flu. You see it
everywhere. Every website, every newspaper and magazine, every tv
newscast, on billboards and corner posters, everywhere.

You could be the first guy on your block to refuse FB, and better yet,
get your "REAL" friends to stop using it too. If I want to talk to a
friend, I use the phone, or email, or just visit them. I dont need
the world to know that my dog had puppies, just my friends who like
dogs.

Real friends dont Bore their Friends, and Real friends dont let their
friends use facebook.

Thanks for the info. I've been considering putting up an, um, bogus FB page.
It would list awards received, patents claimed, degrees earned, and other
intellectual highlights, not forgetting the 1999 nomination for a Nobel
Prize. I would detail the time I spent in the volunteer soup kitchen and in
packing food for starving children in darkest Africa. I would certainly list
the efforts spent mentoring minority youth, the hours contributed as a
teacher's aide, the signatures for World Peace I collected, and so on.

Having been active in politics earlier in my life, rest assured its fairly
easy to manufacture a biography (check Elizabeth Warren's current
difficulty).