I saw the disclaimer starting with "Dear visitors from Google..." about halfway down this page and my brain refused to process what the disclaimer appeared to be telling me. People couldn't really be this stupid...

Then I read the comments.

I have tears in my eyes, but I don't know if it's from laughing or because the world is full of idiots. And they have internet access.

I've been a long-time opponent of Facebook, and social networking sites in general (my opposition started way back when Orkut was the cool thing). My reasons are simple: I value privacy and I feel these sites make too much information available to both civil authorities as well as corporations. My canned summary of this position was to ask: "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?", quoting our infamous McCarthy, who would have absolutely adored Facebook, with its easy-to-navigate graphs of relationships.

I still feel Facebook should have never existed and is simply too dangerous.

So why did I join (and friend a lot of people)? The reasons are myriad, but at the end of the day it comes down to this: the genie is out of the bottle and can't be put back in. My wife is on Facebook, my friends are on Facebook. Facebook already knows who I am, and who my friends are. Despite the fact that I chose not to engage, I have to finally admit I'm already part of the system. At this point, I can either pretend this isn't the case, or I can choose to engage on my own terms, as best I can.

We are all aware of the abuses of Facebook and its complete and utter disregard for its user's privacy. But I've also seen Facebook used to empower people in ways previously unheard of. The turning point for me came a couple of days ago when I read this article, about a "flash mob" of 40,000 people who came together, mostly via Facebook, to protest against a wealthy neighborhood who wanted to keep them out. This is something previously unheard of, and really, previously impossible. The reality is that Facebook and friends are, like most powerful technologies, a double-edged sword; we can either allow it to be wielded against us, or we can wield it ourselves.

In any case, I've decided that Facebook (and social networks in general), are little more than the culmination of the Internet as a whole. Really, if we wanted to stop Facebook, we'd have needed to stop the Internet (and for many of the same reasons). At the end of the day, for better or worse, the world is now networked. Anonymity is over and has been for some time. While I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, I have a gut feeling that the only hope we have for privacy is to create such a glut of data that it can never be fully digested, that to parade our social networks is possibly the only protection we have left. After all, if they know my wife, my friends, my family, what good is my own anonymity?

I'm not a fan of social networking in general (Orkut was the first to give me a sense of neo-McCarthyistic potential for abuse). This article seems to indicate that the paranoid fears I developed weren't too far off base.