Facebook & me

Facebook’s cavalier attitude to people’s private information has meant that many, like me, have resisted having anything to do with it. There is a very well-publicised case of an Austrian student, Max Schrems, who is taking Facebook to task over practices such as keep users’ data after the users deleted it. Also there are allegations that it is creating ‘shadow profiles’. Apart from such practices, I am always astonished that people are willing to share ownership of their creations with Facebook. It’s quite common to find people on Deviant Art saying that you can also find them on Facebook and I wonder do they realise that Facebook can take any of their photographs/drawings and cheerfully sell them on. I will be very interested to see if some photographer takes an award-winning photograph, puts it up on Facebook, and then finds that (s)he no longer has exclusive rights to it.