There is this “Thing” thats been bugging me fore quite some time now and thats been getting worse and worse the last few years. Its what I like to call the “facebookisation” of the Internet. Maybe its even Facebook itself that I perceive to be a foreign body in the Internet organism.
It all began quite some while ago with me (a normally very early adopter when it comes to new things on the Internet) not wanting to have a Facebook profile. It wasn’t only about the idea of giving someone, who clearly has no right to it, a one time profile of my personal information. It was about the fact that I was practically inviting this “facebook person” to my every day life. Yes I know a lot of you have the naive idea of filtering information that flows to Facebook. But face it its nonsense… in fact I really told (and tell) everybody that. They laughed at me (and still do). When all that NSA stuff came out (and still comes out), I though people would finally agree that personal information flow has to be limited in some way.. that no one company (worse yet a company under the influence of a completely broken down law system) should get that much information. But people simply don’t care. And I have to admit that I don’t care about them not caring. It’s their life. If they get shot at by a drone or vanish into thin air because they liked the wrong thing, it was their life to give.
But lately Facebook has reached about the maximum amount of “willing” users they can get (Q3 2014 its about 1.35 billion active user [1], not counting inactive accounts). So now (almost like in a dictatorship thats gotten as much advocacy they can get through normal methods) they slowly start making life harder for all the people not using Facebook (by increasing social pressure). This started with competitions where you could only enter if you are using Facebook and like stuff (can’t say I really care), went on to a lot of games where you actually get benefits from attaching you Facebook account to the game account (there I care more.. I’m a game dev.. I don’t like that) and lately whole services stop writing their own authentication processes and rely solely on Facebook for that!
Not only do those companies provide Facebook (and thus the US government too) with free profiling data, but they’re also discriminating all non Facebook users by simply denying them their services! Thus again increasing the social pressure of joining Facebook (you can’t believe peoples reactions when I tell them I don’t use Facebook). This brings up a lot of very bad memories from history lessons and books I read about the past history of Germany! And it shows how fast our society is willing to forget their past when it supports their laziness. I would say “beware of the beginnings!” but I’m afraid we’re already past the point where people would be willing to abstain from Facebbok. Just because governments use private companies today to do their dirty work for them does not mean they are not involved!
So if you’re a dev (or better yet a game dev) and are writing an app or a web app or whatever, think about your authentication process before blindly relying on external services. There are open source variants for authentication procedures and you have a database for your stuff anyway! Stop discriminating people and start using your brain!
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin
