Social Media's Quasi-Social Activities Endanger Users

Do you still trust social media? Are you still using them?

If you have no problem with others knowing intimate details of your life, and not only those facts that you have chosen to put on your pages, fine. But what if you are of the opinion that your credit card number, plus details of access to your bank accounts should be exclusively yours and nobody else's? Real-life stories confirm what many have suspected all along: social media networks are sieves. Some more than others, but all of them are.

Here's a real-life story that should scare the heck out of all Facebook users.A guy, let's call him Jack, is browsing through the day's news. He sees a trashy item about someone who's called "personality" just because s/he has appeared on some kind of a reality TV show.

By the way, aren't you amazed by the inflation of the word: personality? It used to mean much more than it means now. But we digress.

Anyhow, Jack (or whatever his real name is) clicks on the headline to read more. Except, he's been using that particular newspaper's application (app for short) that enables something known as "social reading," whatever THAT is supposed to mean. He got the application via (yes, you guessed right) Facebook.

Within five (count them: five) minutes he's swamped by an avalanche of reactions from people he never knew existed, in places he never knew existed.

Not only that those people knew Jack read the raunchy item, but because some of the information reached some of them second- or third- or nth- hand, they knew a lot about Jack, but they also knew a lot about everybody else who joined in the conversation.

There have been cases like that galore. Facebook calls it Open Graph platform, and the so-called "frictionless sharing" application is an integral part of it.

Here's what happens: everybody and their dog now uses a link to Facebook (and several other social media outlets), and they take the multimedia content we have accessed in any shape or form and proceed to publish the information to our Facebook profiles. You don't even have to click the Like button.

After all, it's about being social, right? RIGHT?

You know what? If you decide to be social, you will be social, and you will socialize with people of your choosing. That would be the preferred route for most of us.

Frictionless sharing, say its defenders, makes sharing so much easier. Yes. But again: don't you want to decide whom to share what with?

Jaron Lanier, the guy who gave the world some of the best tools for creating virtual reality, has written a book. You're Not a Gadget is its name. Available online through Amazon. He's aghast where the genie he helped free from his bottle has been leading us.

Rightly so.

Facebook has been promising apps for everyone: no matter what your interest, they'll have an application for you.

Thus Marshall Kirkpatrick in ReadWriteWeb: "I think there's something more fundamental going on [...] I think this is a violation of the relationship between the web and its users. Facebook is acting like malware."

Let's hope these are not just elegant famous last words.

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