Facebook are evil

[emperor]

So, facebook have a thing called "friend finder". You give it your email address and password(!), and it grobbles through your email account (!!) to which you have just given it unlimited access(!!!), supposedly to find the email addresses of your friends who aren't on facebook, so you can invite them to create a FB account.

Now, I would never trust a random website with my email account details, and I hope you would never do so either. It's worse than that, however. Facebook is carrying out a careful social compliance attack on you to persuade you to give up your account details. You've probably seen boxes that say "Sarah and Paul have found friends using Facebook's Friend Finder. Give it a try!", you may even have seen them with my name in (I know several people have, and I have the screenshots to prove it). These boxes make it seem safer for you to give facebook your email details - after all, your friends (including, possibly, those who are more computer-savvy than you) have done so, so it can't be so bad, can it? They're lies. I have never given facebook my email account details. Facebook is lying to you, is using my reputation as the grumpy bastard with no social skills who knows his way round a computer to lie to you, to con you into giving it control of your email account.

In my view, that's pretty evil.

Comments

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

I'm really tempted to stop using it and come back to LJ for those quick one sentence updates - better than a twitter feed which is, frankly, tedious to read. LJ will take text messages and was doing it much earlier than other services, but one at a time (I think).

Prob is with the bulk of my social network on FartBoak (oh, I'm so mature), we don't get the responses on LJ that we used to, and my family and other friends use FB so some stuf is having to go on there. If only we could persuade people to start using LJ by default again, instead of FB.

[hooloovoo_42]

I have a mostly different bunch of contacts on FB. I still prefer LJ for all things. But most of my LJ friends seem to want to use FB or Twitter via their whizzy smartphones. I am still here, on LJ, sitting around and playing with myself!