How Facebook is Like a Nude Beach

I love Al Franken.  He was funny on Saturday Night Live and he’s a great writer.  I especially like his titles – I think “Rush Limbaugh is a Big,  Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” are two of the most succinct, honest and powerful titles in the history of books.  I approve of the contents as well, but the titles are brilliant.

Al Franken

So far, he’s been a pretty good Senator, too.  He has shown eloquence and grace in standing up to the right, diplomacy and diligence in getting the job done.  As a politician, he is not a comedian, which is more than you can say for certain other Minnesota politicians.

So, I take it seriously when he warns against facebook and google’s intrusion into our private lives.  But I don’t actually agree with him on this one.

Sure, they are harvesting our private information.  Facebook knows when my birthday is, who my “friends” are, and which games I play (none – I’m not there for the games.)  If they’re paying attention to my posts, which are almost all linking to this blog, they also know that I smoke shitloads of marijuana, think 9/11 was an inside job, don’t believe in God, am interested in space exploration and all sorts of other futuristic stuff which is a bit strange, since i really understand very little about science and am a bit technophobic in my personal life, and hate Republicans with a passion.

When I write about these things I am saying, implicitly,  that I don’t mind if facebook, and everybody else in the world, knows these things about me.  It’s sort of like visiting a nude beach.  If you’ve got something you don’t want people to see – a 3rd testicle, for instance – you probably aren’t going to go there.

Google, I guess, is also paying attention to what you search for most but, there, I’m all over the board.  I think if I were to look at a list of the things I’ve looked up on Google in, say, the last year, even I couldn’t discern a pattern.

Franken’s argument is that these companies are monopolies and that we are not actually their customers but their product.  They make their money on advertising and on selling our personal information to advertisers.  And, he is right, as far as that goes.  They might not technically be monopolies, but they are so dominant they might as well be.  And, we are their product.

That’s their business model – they aren’t exactly secretive about it.  The upside of this is that we get these services for free.

Given a choice between allowing them to see me naked – metaphorically – and paying them money, I will take the former.  Bearing in mind, of course, that there are certain things  maybe I shouldn’t write.