“It’s Not A/B Testing. It’s Just Being an Asshole.” ⇥ kottke.org

Tim Carmody on Kottke.org:

We all buy in to Facebook (and Twitter, and OKCupid, and every other social media network), giving them a huge amount of personal data, free content, and discretion on how they show it to us, with the understanding that all of this will largely be driven by choices that we make. We build our own profiles, we select our favorite pictures, we make our own friends, we friend whatever brands we like, we pick the users we want to block or mute or select for special attention, and we write our own stories.

[…]

This is why it really stings whenever somebody turns around and says, “well actually, the terms you’ve signed give us permission to do whatever we want. Not just the thing you were afraid of, but a huge range of things you never thought of.”

It’s an inherent problem in the way that the social web works today. Experiments with exchanging less personal information and therefore being less susceptible to these kinds of activities, like App.net, have proved largely unsuccessful. So far, we have elected to sacrifice more of our control in exchange for no-monetary-cost services. What’s the point at which we — the user base — will collectively decide to back away?