Facebook: Isn't it enough we said sorry?

Image from: Ghostery Assuages Privacy Concerns - Note: I have no more faith in "Ghostery" than in Facebook.
If you empty your cache between website visits, there won't be anything to track.


​Facebook says "We're sorry. We'll be good. We Promise."

Oh no, not another investigation!

Lobbying commissioner asked to investigate Facebook
NDP questions whether Facebook executive Kevin Chan’s meetings with cabinet ministers are lobbying

• In a letter sent to Commissioner Nancy Bélanger on Friday, NDP MP Charlie Angus questioned whether the social media giant is finding ways around the rules, especially the rules that require it to register its lobbyists. The company has no registered lobbyists, despite frequent meetings with senior decision-makers.

I feel confident in saying that, of course, Facebook gets around the rules. When politicians want to use Facebook for publicity, they're going to need to give something in return, don't you think?

I predict this action will fizzle out, because I can't see the Libs or the Cons wanting to do anything except say they'll look into it. You know, like Bill C-51, which the Libs promised to take the bite out of if they were elected. You decide if they really defanged the monster in the new C-59.

If you saw the US Senators grilling Zukerberg [YouTube], you know that his "sorry" there was mostly quite sufficient. You could tell by the look on Zukerberg's face whether the Senator was friendly or a little too probing. He would beam as mentors praised his amazing talents, but his bottom lip would protrude and he would look genuinely hurt as a few (usually women, for some reason) poked a little too hard.  It was almost as if he had been assured in advance that the session would go easy on him and he was taken off-guard when there seemed to be some actual pointed criticism.

What Zukerberg knows is that Facebook users are their own worst enemies in this situation. They really think that this is the only way they can share their doings and photos with their friends and loved ones? They don't want to share badly enough to go to the trouble of sending an email with attachments, or licking a stamp?

It doesn't bother me that some people prefer to communicate through Facebook, but they shouldn't act surprised that they're pretty much bare-nekkid out there. Accept it; you wanted to get noticed, and you did. Movie stars, too, complain about the very thing they spent their lives attaining -- public attention. Once they get it, they want privacy, but every child has heard, "You can't have your cake and eat it too."

One of the weirdest examples of people placing too much importance on trivia, is the story of "Life Log".

As a commenter to this CBC article, Robert McNicol pointed out:

• We now know that in 2004 the Military Industrial Complex scrubbed "Life Log" where they would snoop on people for their entire lifetime.
• Then the next day in 2004 FaceBook was formed. FB, Twitter, and yes Google are all created by darpa/cia. Not some young whiz kids as they'd have us believe. The Cambridge bit is just the scapegoat. It's deeper than you think.

Well, there's food for thought. Keeping a Lifelog: The Definitive Guide

Here's more about Life Log's Darpa/CIA connection:

• In 1998 Mann started a community of lifeloggers (also known as lifebloggers or lifegloggers) which has grown to more than 20,000 members. Throughout the 1990s Mann presented this work to the U.S. Army, with two visits to US Natick Army Research Labs, as well as a formal invited talk.

DARPA Lifelog

• ... aims to compile a massive electronic database of every activity and relationship a person engages in. This is to include credit card purchases, web sites visited, the content of telephone calls and e-mails sent and received, scans of faxes and postal mail sent and received, instant messages sent and received, books and magazines read, television and radio selections, physical location recorded via wearable GPS sensors, biomedical data captured through wearable sensors. The high level goal of this data logging is to identify "preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality".

Some of the cruellest rhetorical words you'll ever hear are: "I said I'm sorry; what more do you want?" And then there are some who never say they're sorry, but instead will accuse you of "dwelling on the past".

That's probably how the term "history repeats itself" came about: by not examining our faults; not mending our ways.

Facebook will no doubt have occasion to mouth more "sorries" as time goes on.  And they will be forgiven, because after all, it wasn't Facebook that invaded your privacy - it was the government in the form of so-called "security" services.  Facebook kept quiet about it -- and that's why "sorry" is good enough.

Below image: From the Australian: It's not media invading our privacy, it's the government.