Facebook is full of it.

 

At Facebook, we always look out for the privacy of our users. That’s a key reason users feel safe sharing their information on our site.

Uh, no. I don’t feel safe sharing information on your site, which is why I limit what I post there. Anytime anyone publishes information online they are making a conscious decision to take it out of the private sphere. Anybody who thinks differently is either born yesterday or hasn’t been online very long.

In a terrific example of burying the lede, the point of the linked post above can be found in paragraph six (of seven):

Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

 

Check out this post at TechCrunch for a less skewed read on Facebook’s ploy. UPDATE:Arrington follows up today with a post in which he lays out his reaction a bit more fully, and I think he’s dead on.

I think Facebook’s intentions aren’t to let users get data out of the network until Facebook is absolutely forced to do so, and then only on Facebook’s terms (see Facebook Connect). The fact is, this isn’t Facebook’s data. It’s my data. And if I give Google permission to do stuff with it, I’m damned well within my rights to do so. By blocking Google, Facebook has blocked ME. And that, frankly, kind of frustrates me.

Let me put this another way. How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data!

 

In other words, Facebook is the RIAA of the social networking world. The fact that everyone is more or less tied to them, doesn’t make them right.

Pretty stupid.