Stowe Boyd

Facebook really changed things up last week. Oh sure, it’s as disrespectful of my privacy as ever, but now it’s enlisted the entire web to help. So I’m done with anything that requires a Facebook login.

Facebook made some big changes in terms of how things look and work, but its inexorable drive to drag us all into publicly sharing everything from everywhere with everyone all the time remained consistent. The most noticeable new features that reflect that are Timeline and Ticker. Ticker delivers real-time updates of your friends’ actions, while Timeline archives everything you’ve ever done on Facebook. But the big change, the true assault to your privacy, is under the hood: Open Graph.

Open Graph is a development tool that lets third-party apps and sites report your activities back to Facebook. It’s meant to extend or replace the Like button. It’s a way for sites and services to jack directly into Facebook from anywhere. If companies use Open Graph, they can publish to your Ticker and Timeline, too, effectively sending tattle-tale updates on anything you do to everyone you know, in real time.

- Matt Honan, Unlike: Why Facebook Integration Is Actually Antisocial

Matt adopts the perfect ‘what the fuck’ voice for this story.

Facebook is proving — again — that it isn’t designed as a platform for us to share and grow and interact. It is a thin veneer of social interaction on top of a platform designed to suck away as much metadata as possible for the benefit of corporations.

Facebook is like television. If you came from a planet where something like TV existed, but had no commercials, and then you landed on Earth, you’d wonder why anyone ever watched it at all. Meanwhile all the Earthlings have been raised watching commercials and hardly notice them, but they are being programmed to buy this beer or that eyeliner.