Don’t Judge a [Face]book By Its Cover

If you do not have a Facebook account and are complaining about one of a plethora of things that have recently become quite trendy to complain about, please shut up and go away. It’s not your battle. As a matter of fact, it isn’t a battle at all.

If you do happen to be a Facebook user, and have also succumb to the vogue that is ridiculing Zuckerberg’s notorious kin, please delete your account (preferably on May 31, which happens to be my birthday!)

Then shut up and go away.

To sum it up, here are the main tenants of the most recent complaints:

• Privacy changes
• A recent, embarrassing glitch
• Open Graph (more privacy complaining)
• Another recent embarrassing glitch
• Exporting user data to advertisers (just another way to complain about privacy…again)
• And of course, Zuckerberg dropping the F-Bomb when he was in college.  God forbid.

Do any amount of reading about any one of these popular complaints, and you will discover that there is only one real issue: privacy.  Thus, I refer you to the following brilliantly written article entitled Facebook Privacy?  Who Cares? (it’s long, skim through later when you’re bored)

I submit, as did Mr. Cuban, that the Facebook privacy issues are none other than trendy headlines, and bandwagons for a generation that had no Woodstock to jump onto faster than you deleted (or at least stopped using) your MySpace account.

No, we don’t really care about how our data is shared any more than we care about identical privacy issues in our non-digital lives.  And let’s not forget that this is an optional service that posts or shares only what you feed to it.

“How dare this free, voluntary service not live up to my own personal, rigorous standards!”

It’s time for personal responsibility to trump issues like this.  It’s time for the complainers to decide how they really feel about Facebook, and do something about it.  Most of all, it’s time to stop giving Facebook so much credit, whether positive or negative.  Facebook isn’t insensitive and irresponsible, people are.  We’re flawed.  Sorry.  I mean, is this really Facebook’s fault?

But the sooner we become comfortable with whose fault it really is, the sooner we can all update our statuses and spread the word.