Paying for Privacy?!

I think my tinfoil hat must have slid off my head a little bit cause I just had a totally moon batty idea.

Facebook is not a big fan of privacy, because they want all your information to be as public as possible so they can use that information to sell ads. Take a look at the links below, they do a better job of illustrating both how Facebook has changed in regard to “your” information, but also how the average consumer feels about their privacy Facebook and online in general.

From the EFF
From Gizmodo
From Mashable
From cnet

Basically if Facebook had their way everything on your profile would be public, we are getting to the point where the privacy controls are really just there to make people like me feel a little bit better. My moonbat theory is what if Facebook was to create a pay model? For a price you would have total control over your profile, you could fine tune all your settings just the way you want them. What makes me think this is that originally Facebook said they would not share any information you did not want them to share, but over time that has been loosened up to the point we are at now.

It’s the people that pay attention to tech and things like privacy that are always jumping up and down whenever FB makes one of these changes, but the general public just goes either unaware or they just don’t care. FB knows this, I mean why else would they have defaulted your settings to Public when the other option was to keep the settings they way they were before. They know that when people want to get on to harvest their freaking Farmville radishes they don’t want to read stuff, reading is hard, so they just click next, next, next and then suddenly they now have their profile public for everyone. FB designed the privacy change screens with this in mind.

On top of that they basically make trying to actually configure your settings so complex that I have even given up a few times to get them configured the way I want. The issue is that they kind of have us over a barrel; FB has become an important part of the internet, for better or for worse (I think for worse, but that’s just me) and to opt totally out of FB would limit your social networking abilities on the intertrons. So you can’t really delete your profile, granted they make that hard as hell to do as well, and you don’t really have any control over your information, so what’s a tinfoil hat wearing privacy nut like me supposed to do? Well, jump up and down and yell and scream every time they change the privacy policy, but if they were to let me pay a little bit to have control over my privacy, I would probably do it (it would depend on the cost). They could say that it is to offset the ads costs associated with the loss of information of use privacy nut jobs.

Imagine if in 6 month Facebook came out with this idea after continuously scaring the people like me, this would look like a breath of fresh air in terms of their usual tactics. They could then basically do whatever the hell they want after that with the information of the people that don’t care about their FB privacy.

Puts tinfoil hat back on head squarely