Facebook does not connect people together; Facebook connects people to Facebook, Inc.
Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons
Abstract: Facebook’s business model is to be the man in the middle; to track every move you, your family, and your friends make, to store all that information indefinitely, and continuously analyse it to understand you better in order to exploit you by manipulating you for financial and political gain.
Facebook isn’t a social network, it is a scanner that digitises human beings. It is, for all intents and purposes, the camera that captures your soul. Facebook’s business is to simulate you and to own and control your simulation, thereby owning and controlling you.
An alternative is possible [though - if not too late:
A healthy economy built upon an ethical core.
Interoperability, free (as in freedom) technology with “share alike” licenses, a peer-to-peer architecture (as opposed to client/server), and a commons-funded core are the fundamental safeguards for preventing this new system from decaying into a new version of the monopolistic surveillance web we have today.
– Aral Balkan, cyborg rights activist