It's Everywhere

Back in the early days of Facebook, I had pretty much zero interest in it. In 2006, I was in my late thirties, and Facebook seemed like something that twentysomethings were into - I demographic that I hadn't really been all that fond of when I was an active member, and I didn't have any friends or relations in the cohort that I felt a need to keep up with. So I passed. This has given me some distance on the various flavors of controversy that have popped up around the platform as people realize that a) Facebook is a business and b) its users are not its customers.

Last week's edition of TIME magazine is about Facebook, and the cover reads as follows:

It owns your data.
It knows your friends.
It has your credit cards.
It hears your conversations.
It follows you everywhere.
And you can't go a day without it.

Two through five, I concede, may very well be true. I've been given to understand that Facebook creates profiles on the people who aren't on the platform, but are mentioned by people who are. And while I still don't know any twentysomethings who are on the platform (not more than in passing, anyway), I've been told that my mother, sister and niece all have Facebook accounts. And so, as concerns the first bullet, I presume that Facebook has worked up a file on me, and is patiently waiting for me to sign up for an account, so that they can link it to me, and add my personal information to the pile of data that they're busily selling off to the various businesses and other organizations that are their actual customers. But with the looming deprecation of Google Plus being about two months out, I suspect that we'll find that the last statement is decidedly false.

While people have been piling into the lifeboats and setting out for a new social-media ship to board, I've decided that I'm going allow myself to slip (mostly) back beneath the waves again. I was fine without an active personal (as opposed to professional) social media presence before a friend invited me to Google Plus, and I am comfortable in the idea that I'll be fine once it goes away.

Part of it is the old man in me. I was perfectly capable of finding ways to stay in touch with people prior to the advent of social media, and while I'm not going to say that the hodgepodge of methods that I've developed over the years is as efficient as Facebook, it serves my needs well enough. And as with a host of other technologies, I have decided against learning a new way of doing something simply to do it in a new way.

Part of it is a certain dubiousness concerning Facebook. It's one thing to decide that Facebook is untrustworthy after having sunk hundreds or thousands of hours into making it a central hub of one's life. It's quite another to come to that determination prior to coming to the platform.

But a lot of it is understanding people. Facebook is in the position that it's in today because protecting oneself from whatever negative influence once perceives that it has means not only standing up to Facebook, but to everyone else on Facebook that one is connected with and doesn't share the same viewpoint.

In order for Facebook, or any other business, for that matter, to really have its customer's interests at heart, those customers have to be able to punish the business for doing otherwise. And in the case of Facebook, the people who have spent so much time creating and curating their pages, they aren't even the customers. Suppliers might be a more apt description. But that does bring a certain amount of power with it, so long as enough people choose to exercise it.

I'm curious to see how this all turns out. I suspect that the regulatory route won't work as well as people hope; regulators don't have a good track record with these things. Perhaps it will take people learning that they can go a day without it, instead.