I knew the social networking giant had jumped the shark way back in 2008 when one of my mother’s friends wanted to know if I had a Facebook so she could “friend me”. Two years later when my beloved Daniel told me he was establishing a Facebook account I told him that I had lost respect for him. Despite that, when he joined I felt some desire to join as well, still I shied away from it.

And I’ve never been able to articulate precisely what it was that made me so uneasy about the concept of Facebook, other than a few (mostly) glib remarks about hating people and not voluntarily interacting with them any more than I already must.

This morning I was flipping through the current issue of Newsweek and I came across an editorial by David Lyons on the subject of Facebook and the privacy concerns surrounding it and he managed to put into words what I could not:

In the past five years Facebook has repeatedly changed its privacy policy, always in one direction, and every time this happens, the same movie plays out: people complain, Facebook stonewalls, then spins, then pretends to be contrite, then finally walks things back—a bit. Nobody seems to notice that, after the walk-back, Facebook is still grabbing more personal info than it was before …
The truth is, Zuckerberg needs your data. His business is built on it. You are not Facebook’s customer. You are its inventory—you are the product Facebook is selling.

The article goes more into much more detail about the nature of the changes, etc. It goes so far as to note that the current rendition of the privacy scuffle will in all likelihood play out without leaving so much as a dent in Facebook’s popularity. (100 millions new users in the last four months is an astounding figure.) I hold out hope that it will one day soon hit a saturation point and become just another fad that nobody wants to admit having once taken part in. (MySpace, anyone?)

Daniel does make a good point when he notes that I share far more information on my LibraryThing account than he does on his Facebook one. I’m comfortable with people knowing I own a lot of books; I’m even comfortable with the inferences that can be drawn from my collection such as the fact that many of the horizontal surfaces in my apartment have books stacked on them — twenty-six volumes deep in spots, if you must know. The difference is that LibraryThing has never made me feel like a commodity, which these days on the web is rare.