Adam-Jackson

I’m the worst when it comes to research, organizing information and putting it in quotes for you all to digest. That kind of work is what true jounalism and high paid bloggers are for. No I’m just going to be one guy talking out his ass about FaceBook’s news today. Retweetist shows today’s top retweeted URLs and FaceBook’s TOS news hogs it all. Even Twitter Trends are showing Facebook, TOS and other things at the top. It’s interesting because I didn’t even notice all of this was happening until receiving 5 DMs from friends saying, “I’m leaving FaceBook and you should consider doing the same.” Wow. Well, I was intrigued and began investigating. All of this was over FaceBook keeping your information forever. That’s it?

How many times have you clicked “I Agree” when signing up for a new service. I agree to terms once a day since I joined the web in 1996. Forums, chat rooms, web services, banks and social networks all have terms of service and iTunes sometimes changes theirs and forces you to re-agree to new terms just to access their music store or play the music you legally purchased. These TOS agree buttons have forced us to not think twice about what we’re agreeing too and a few sites occasionally delve into the terms with a lawyer and discover some horrifying truths. Well, here’s the truth about The Internet as a whole.

Nothing you do at a computer, on a cell phone or on your television is private anymore. Someone in some remote location can find out everything you order on pay per view, every email you send to our girlfriend and every Myspace message you send to your ex-girlfriend. Every time you load Bittorrent or sync your iPhone, usage statistics, logs and kilobytes of information are stored in a remote server and someone has the password to see that info. Scared? I’m not.

I installed Little Snitch on my Apple laptop and was pretty astonished when every single Apple application from iLife to Calculator and TextEdit brought up a window that says, “This application is trying to connect to xxxx.apple.com” and I had the choice to allow or deny that connection. Why the hell would Calculator.app try to connect to Apple? I can only assume it’s usage statistics and maybe Apple is analyzing how often I use certain equations or what buttons I push the most. After a few weeks of receiving this notifications, I uninstalled Little Snitch and I’m just leaving it up to chance now. I don’t care what Apple knows about me because I have some logic that you should all get through your head.

If I custom built my own hardware and operating system. I mean actually custom built my own processors and expansion cards and built my own unique operating system and then bought some black fiber without using my own ISP (no Comcast or AT&T) and then put a computer on this end of the US and another computer on the other end of the US and installed a web server in between and then sent an email through that web server to my grandmother then I might have complete and utter privacy. Once you throw in Comcast Internet, Microsoft Windows, Outlook 2007, Gmail and fiber that you don’t own, everyone between you and grandma have full right to access that information and there’s not a god damn thing you can do about it.

So they the hell is FaceBook getting so much shit? Because they came out and said, “we own your information” and that upset people. The masses need to understand that each instant message, email, tweet, website, forum post, blog post and song you add or download from the web is logged, archived, saved and indexed on a server somewhere and at some point in your Internet travels, you agreed to terms of service without even thinking and this content is saved forever without you even knowing it. From now on, just know that nothing is private, behave yourself, don’t cheat on your girlfriend, don’t look at illegal porn and don’t steal music because it’s being logged and there’s no need bitching about it.