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

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

It's good, isn't it?

See, what it does is bundle all of its friend finding services together under "friends finder" so if you've ever clicked on one of its "friends recommendations" you've used the friends finder service and it can tell everyone you've used it...

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad I finally worked out how to delete my Facebook account. It just gets more and more annoying.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

my reputation as the grumpy bastard with no social skills who knows his way round a computer

Oi! That's my job.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Of course, if you give another website your FB password, they close your account for violating thier T&C.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Between Facebook and Gmail I've pretty much given up on humanity and computers, these days. I confess to resenting the fact that both invade my privacy despite the fact that I've never had an account with either.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

I'm really, really tempted to just delete my FB account. I've lied with most of the personal info I've given it and the password is not one I use anywhere else, and you better believe I'm *never* giving it access to my email. But it's so damn useful in ways, and there are so many people I'd completely lose contact with if I did that, an idea I dislike. Argh.

But yes. They lie a lot.

[clarienne.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm tempted to delete my account now. :(

[purplepiano.livejournal.com]

Perhaps some people on your friends list found you by using the Friend Finder, and by some feat of grammatical gymnastics, it's deemed OK to then state that you found them using it. I'm sure some relations of mine have used it, for instance, so that contacts involving me have been created using this tool.

I'm not excusing it, just predicting how FB might be able to weasel out of the lie.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, my facebook account is basically a placeholder in case that turned out to be where a mass migration from LJ would go to.

Based on posts like this, perhaps I ought not worry about such an eventuality.

[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 was always wary of the FB friend finder and no way was I giving it my email password (apart from the fact my FB is linked to a totally different email address anyway!). But when you posted yesterday, I checked and discovered I can use the Adblock Plus element hider to hide all those annoying bits on the FB sidebar. That made me very happy.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

My experience was that when I signed up they made it look like you needed to give them the same password as the email address you were using, because otherwise it wouldn't work. Since Google has been doing big combined things for a long time, I didn't really think about the fact that Facebook =/= Hotmail, and so I just straight away fell for it.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

Also, when Adrian first set up an account he was straight away given a list of friends of his who were already on Facebook. He had not given FB access to HIS email, but anyone who had, and who had Adrian in THEIR email contacts was instantly listed. Creepy, but at the time it seemed well meaning. Obviously we know better now.