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

[didiusjulianus.livejournal.com]

That's fine, we're all different. My point was that even if that is the case (which is it for me too with some people some of the time) there are STILL other ways to do it (phone, text, email, other social networking sites, letters in seasonal or birthday cards, occasional visits & son on) IF Facebook is not longer living up to expectations. The old ways worked before and still do now.

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

I keep in much closer touch with my family, who live on the far side of an ocean + continent, through Facebook's fairly passive information-sharing than I do with email.