Facebook is evil

Where I live now, in Port Alberni, nobody knows that the Internet actually exists.  They all use the Internet: they use Facebook.  But nobody here understands that there are other tools that exist on the Internet, and that the Internet is a huge space, with lots of tools in it, and lots of information in it, and that Facebook is only one.  And, not a particularly useful one at that.

As a security maven, this is personally embarrassing.  After all, all of us in the information security area know that Facebook is bad.  Facebook is insecure.  Facebook is *inherently* insecure.  Facebook is based on the idea of taking your data, and wants, and thoughts, and any other personal information that they can obtain about you, and selling it to other people.  So, Facebook does not care about confidentiality at all.  At least, not *your* confidentiality.  They very jealously guard their own confidentiality, in terms of how the internally operate, and their algorithms, and the ways in which they manipulate you to try and get you to spend more and more time on Facebook.  But they don't care about your privacy at all.

Of course, we have known some of this from the beginning.  In the beginning, Facebook was insecure.  And people complained about that.  And so Facebook, instead of revisiting how they actually worked, threw some security patches on top of an insecure system.  As any information security specialist can tell you, this is the wrong way to do security.  The right way to do security is to build it in from the beginning.  But Facebook didn't do that.  As more and more people found more and more security problems with Facebook, Facebook threw more and more patches on top of the insecure system.  Eventually, there were so many security settings, in so many different areas, in so many different functions, in so many different settings environments, that it was pretty much impossible to tell whether you had, in fact, secured information on Facebook, which you thought you had secured to a select group of people.  One of my friends (in both the real world and the Facebook sense) tried, at one point, to use Facebook as a platform to post security essays and information.  In doing so, he, of course, tried to make these postings world readable.  This is supposed to be possible on Facebook, and, generally speaking, it is.  But with the plethora of security settings on Facebook, he was not able to, successfully, always ensure that these postings were, in fact, world readable.  If it's impossible for a security specialist to ensure that something is world readable, how is the average Facebook user to figure out how to keep certain postings private, and confidential to a specific group?

But Facebook's evil has now entered new realms.  Facebook has been, essentially, stealing information, and reselling it, for years.  They are taking your information and selling it to various companies.  In order to get you to spend more time on Facebook, they are taking content that is available in other places, and reposting it on Facebook.  And one of the sources of information that they have been using to increase your engagement, and increase the time that you spend on Facebook, is news, from legitimate news services.  Facebook is, of course, not the only Website, or Web tool, or Internet tool, to do this.  And, of course, this has affected the news services, who spend a lot of money paying reporters, building infrastructure, and building delivery systems of their own.  So, the news services are not only annoyed, but in financial difficulties.  And some countries are trying to do something about this.  Australia has, for example.  Australia passed a law saying that if large Internet entities, such as Facebook, want to make news, from Australian news services, available, then they have to recompense the news services in some way.  So, Facebook does that now.  Canada has passed a law, essentially doing the same thing.  For some reason, Facebook has decided to dig in its heels, and not make any provision for recompensing Canadian news services.  In order to fight this battle, Facebook has now decided that any news postings, from Canadian news services, cannot be posted to Facebook.

Now, this is perhaps a political, or business, fight.  Ordinarily, it might not matter all that much.  But, right now, there is a bit of a crisis going on in North America, and particularly in Canada.  There are a lot of wildfires.  Pretty much the whole Hawaiian island of Maui has been burned off.  They've lost a historic town, as well as a number of lives, and a lot more besides.  There are wildfires burning in lots of places.  But, right now, there are a number of wildfires burning in the Northwest Territories, and a number of them are heading towards the city of Yellowknife.  Municipal, territorial, and federal governments are trying to evacuate 20,000 people from Yellowknife.  It's a non-trivial task.  It takes a lot of coordination, and it requires that a lot of people know what the government is planning, and how to participate in that.

Facebook is not helping.  Facebook is, in fact, hindering.  The coverage of press conferences, giving information about the evacuation plans, is being banned by Facebook.  This isn't just an issue of fighting against a law you don't agree with, to increase your bottom line by marginal amount.  This is people's lives we are talking about.

Facebook is evil.

Facebook's ban on items from Canadian news sources was easy to implement.  It would be easy to turn off, even if only temporarily, given the emergency.  But Facebook hasn't done that.

Given my experience here in Port Alberni, I very strongly suspect that a similar situation holds in Yellowknife.  The populations are going to be quite similar.  The towns are very similar in size.  The industrial and business base is going to be very similar.  So, I suspect that most people in Yellowknife do their Internet access through Facebook, and don't even realize that they are using the Internet.  And Facebook is not giving them the information that they need.  The population of Yellowknife needs the best, and newest, and most up-to-date information about the evacuation plans and procedures.  And Facebook is blocking a lot of that.

Facebook is evil.

In response to my first posting that "Facebook is Evil," some have responded that they do not blame Facebook for ignorance or the lack of knowledge on the part of Canadians, or the general population, of the Internet, and the tools of the Internet.

I do.

To a certain extent.  And I know that may sound strange.  The Internet is a mystery, even to a large number of those who use it, among the general population, so why should Facebook be blamed for this general ignorance?

I have had a Facebook account since accounts were available to the general public, following the time during which Facebook was only available to those in certain universities and colleges.  Almost as soon as I started using Facebook, I hated it.  I felt (and, at this distance in time, I cannot give you detailed specifics as to why) that it was going to divide the Internet.  The intervening fifteen or more years has proved me correct.  Studies have actually been done demonstrating that those who use Facebook are primarily unaware that they are using the Internet as the underlying technology, or, indeed, that the Internet is usable aside from Facebook.  I recently had a conversation with someone who very proudly boasted of not having a Facebook account, and then recounted his experiences with an entity which I know to be a Facebook specific group.

Anyway, why should Facebook be blamed for ignorance of the Internet on the part of the general public?  Well, Facebook certainly makes no attempt to educate its users on the underlying technology.  Okay, they are a business, their business is based on getting users to spend more time with Facebook than other Internet tools (and, indeed, the real world) and why should they?  But the thing is that Facebook has also made very specific attempts to promote itself, even at the expense of use of the Internet.  For example, in many developing countries, Facebook made specific arrangements with cell and mobile phone service vendors, to provide data services for free on phone plans.  But, only if the user was actually using Facebook.  And, of course, to make it easier, the Facebook app was installed on all of these phones, whether the user wanted to use Facebook or not.

Facebook did, at one time, make minor efforts to provide Internet access in remote areas.  (Had those efforts come to anything, presumably Facebook would have had some means of ensuring that access was provided only to Facebook.)

Facebook doesn't really *deny* that the Internet exists.  It just doesn't make any efforts; at all; in user education.