All these "Get off Facebook, they are doing a lot of things you don't like"-posts are getting crazy. It's like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody.
Some people are just that: They don't care.
These are awful analogies. A better one might be people (a long time ago) jumping up and down telling you that smoking is linked to cancer/death. Imagine being that guy during a time when smoking was considered healthy! Now, of course, everybody knows - and people are free to make an informed choice about their behaviour. The current situation is compounded by the fact that most users simply don't understand the power of machines and algorithms to draw inferences.
Until there are viable distributed alternatives for non sys-admins, the options seem to be to either give all over to The Man or go live in a cave. The former is too nihilistic for my liking so I'm working towards alternatives http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
Facebook is emphatically not a free service, you pay but not in a way that is visible to you. Privacy as a means of exchange is a relatively new concept and we have not yet learned to put a proper value on it. It will take some major expose rather than individuals coming around like this person did to change that.
It is a "free service" as in you're not paying them with dollars, but you are paying with something else.
I'm not a tin foil hat (I use Gmail, for instance), but the point of the article is valid.
At least that should be a conscious decision on user's part.
It's not so much "get out of fb" it's how you use it.
"but but but it's your privacy!!111" yeah, exactly, that's why I limit the information I share with FB, no location checkins, no "picture every other minute", no "fill your missing data" BS, etc
Also, don't install or use the FB mobile app (good thing it sucks)
There are browser extensions that hide G+/FB/Twitter buttons, it's a good idea to use them
" Even if you never posted anything, they can easily work out your age, gender, sexual orientation and political views. "
Why is this being said with a surprised tone? Oh and this happens in real life too, you don't need fb for that.
"Guess your age and gender"? People on the street can do that too, I better walk with a paper bag over my head.
But there is no one person on the street that can do that for all other people on all the streets on the planet. Concentration of information in one "brain" is the problem, not that not everything is top secret. There is a difference in the possible consequences between some neighbour on the street seeing you and someone having a database of all public movements of all people.
Edit: and that's what I find most troubling: that someone can know much more about me than myself. Things that you can only realize from looking at the data over time, things that are invisible when experienced on real time.
I imagine the synthesis of these forces in the future is technologies that aggregate, but that the indivudal can buy into. Do you want help deciding what to wear based on the weather or time of day, beyond what your assistant can do for you? Then there's a collective data channel you can opt-in to joining, and you'll trade some of your personal private information for access to a digital "collective unconscious" of aggregate data. I liken it to the 23andme approach of collecting genetic profiles.