Facebook’s Plan for World Domination

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I think this is just a coincidence, but my qualms about Facebook seem to have cropped up at exactly the same time that a widespread anti-Facebook backlash has started brewing on the web. Then again, maybe it’s not a coincidence. My qualms came from somewhere, after all. Either way, though, it is a little fortuitous since it was only a week ago that I actually started using Facebook for anything useful. (When I switched to HootSuite as my Twitter client, I went ahead and added a Facebook feed, which means I’ve been following my Facebook news feed for the first time ever for the past week. I could have done this before, but I just never bothered.)

Anyway. It turns out you can hardly swing a dead mouse without hitting an anti-Facebook screed these days. Here’s Ryan Singel:

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

And here’s Robert X. Cringely:

You want to make your Facebook totally private to anyone but your actual friends? You can’t, though you can come close. And it will only take you 50 clicks inside Facebook’s Wonderland-like labyrinth of privacy controls. Have fun.

This week brought news of two separate bugs that let Websites secretly install their apps on your Facebook profile and let your friends eavesdrop on your private chats. Facebook swatted both bugs relatively promptly, but not before they made their way into the press. I can understand how Facebook missed the chat security hole — you have to follow a fairly arcane series of steps to reproduce it. But calling the secret app problem a “bug” is a bit hard to swallow.

Want more? Matt Yglesias shares Harvard memories of Zuckerberg’s questionable dedication to privacy ethics here. And Matt McKeon’s clever timeline of Facebook’s eroding privacy defaults is here. For my part, I’ve redrawn a part of McKeon’s graphic in a different format below. For six different aspects of your Facebook profile, it shows how widely they’re available by default and how those defaults have changed over time. In 2005, for example, your name was available only to your friends and your networks. By 2009 it was available to the entire internet. And by “entire internet,” this often means third party applications who get access to everything you do and everything you like. Some people are fine with that, some people aren’t. But at least you should know.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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