This is something that's been in the noggin for a while, kind of like a bottle of some spice that sits in the back of your kitchen cabinet; you know it's there, but never really use it or even touch it-but you always remind yourself to seek out recipes where it may have some flavor value but otherwise you never use it.

"Facebook themselves are a bad actor" is the comment that jiggled the mind-cabinet enough for that spice bottle to fall off the rack and into full view.

That's the head space I'm in when I ask this question. So with that Caveat Lector out of the way:

Am I out of line in thinking Facebook kind of opened the doors for this by aggressively "graphing" social connections and going full speed at turning relationships into algorithms and then giving everyone and their mama the tools to sculpt all of this data however they please? And that they're probably getting off way too easy?

Last night I said to a friend with much sincerity: I miss the days of MySpace and LiveJournal where I could collect all of my friends into one online space, my own little corner of the internet and interact with them on my terms. No nudges to participate in a post, no prompts to go look at what someone else is doing, no suggestions I go buy what my friend just bought and shared simply because "it's my friend". It existed, we were there, and we didn't need MySpace's help to interact with each other. Of course, that was a different Internet where everyone wasn't trying to analyze and monetize your every click and keystroke.

Just kind of thinking out loud. But curious what others think.