Why are your kids there? In your own words, it's a professional risk, den of commercialism, not to mention the inevitable psychological damage from refreshing a webpage instead of having actual social interactions. And it's not even hip any more.
You are ignoring the reality of network effects. My friends will post photos that include me on Facebook whether I have an account with them or not. My friends will coordinate activities with one another via the group chat and event invitation facilities, including location metadata and description context whether I participate in the discussion or not.
Whether you have the choice to give Facebook data about you is increasingly out of your hands.
Privacy controls were changing.
Posting to groups is slightly trickier than it needs to be. (I only ever post photos to public or to a single group, but selecting that group takes a couple of clicks).
While I can agree that these problems are not exclusive to Facebook I am far more likely to have the problem on Facebook than other networks because of the sheer size of the FB userbase.
No, that behavior has existed since newspapers started printing pictures. You touch on your real problem with Facebook, and that is its size. That's it.
There's the saying, "Quantity has a quality all its own." Turning a thing from an "occasionally" into an "always" can effectively change the nature of the thing entirely.
That's the internet's responsibility.
What, before Facebook you never showed up in your friends' photo album? Or your friends just never let anyone see their photo album? Because I know neither of those were true for me.
So rather than speak to your friends about photos that you are in you would prefer hackers to takedown Facebook and for your friends to lose all their photos and other content...
If you're concerned don't let people take pictures of you. If you are as concerned as you sound don't leave the house. People can take your picture in public and do what they like with it. This is only going to happen more and more as cameras get smaller and put in more places.
"Don't leave the house haw haw" is not a valid response to objections to Facebook's unethical operations.
My point was that this is nothing to do with Facebook. If you go out in public people can take your picture and they can put it on any website they wish. They can publish it in print media too. Facebook preventing you from taking down any photo you appear in isn't unusual - it seems like the best option they have. If group photos started disappearing from my account because one of my friends who voluntarily appeared in them was paranoid I'd be pissed off. For a lot of people that's the only copy of the photo they have. To Facebook it's a choice between pissing off users and satisfying the paranoid who don't even use Facebook. Seems like a simple choice to me.
sounds like exactly the kind of attitude that
>> I basically have no option of recourse, because there's a revised culture thanks to Facebook which tells me it's outside of my hands now.
is complaining about.
I have friends who have asked exactly this of me. Being a friend, I took the photos down.
And the case you're linking to does not involve impersonation. Finally, you can set up an account and never use it so they have nothing to snoop on or use.