Interesting piece by Mark Barrett on why he’s decided to opt out of Facebook after yet another change to the Facebook privacy policy. What it comes down to is a sense that while he’s been given the promise of control over his personal information, the reality is that the control he does have is either limited or not easy to manage.
This claim that users can always control the way information is shared on Facebook is the big lie at the heart of their business model. Facebook is absolutely determined to connect advertisers with user data, and to aid advertisers in mining user data. In order to do that they have made the process of protecting user data so complicated as to be almost impossible to understand, giving them a thin veneer of plausible deniability while at the same time guaranteeing that pathways will remain open — or be opened in the future — through which user data can be accessed by third-party developers.