So, how evil is Facebook, really?

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk With friends like these … I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub? In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, “to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web”. And indeed, this is precisely what’s happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board.

I use Facebook every day now. I’m pretty well hooked. But this article, which talks about the intellectual pedigree (Girard), political sympathies (“Thatcherite”) and financial connections (the CIA) of its board, gives me the creeps in a big way.