Is It Cool To Hate Facebook?

Be it facebook or any other social network website, literally all of them let their users publicize their data or hide it as per their choices. If you have your account in facebook then you have the option to reveal the contents of your profile to everybody or partially or hide it totally. Facebook has around 500+ million users of which around 100+ million users have opted to reveal their personal information. Now, if I go ahead and read that publicly available information then what is wrong in that? A particular user has opted to reveal some information and I am reading it due to his choice. Someone on the Internet has done just the same.

All that this person did was created a script that ran through the publicly available profiles of facebook, zipped them together in one bundle and made them available for download as a torrent. What is wrong in this if someone is using the already available public information. One can argue that few new users might not be aware of privacy options of facebook and henceforth have their profiles open to public but we just can’t help such users. They have to learn by their mistakes or else read a lot before going online.

Since the ‘leak’ of information on the Internet people from around the world have reacted harshly against facebook and condemned the same for not understanding this as a security flaw. Whereas facebook rightfully says that no private data has been compromised and all that was already available on the Internet has been made available as a torrent file. What is the issue with that?

Just have a look at the Google Profiles that Google has made public. They reveal a lot of information too. Why isn’t anyone against Google? Take a look at the public directory of LinkedIn. This directory also reveals plenty of information. Then why is everyone against facebook? Is it just that being against facebook has become a trend and everybody is enjoying that? Is it really that cool?

Tags: facebook, facebook general