Race or religion $x takes over a large portion of the local government. You belong to race or religion $y. All of your friends tell facebook you're a $y and their clever algorithm confirms it based on your last name, which you actually only acquired when your father remarried into your stepmother's caffeinated yogurt family enterprise. Local, infiltrated gov't decides to launch a pogrom against $x. They come and get you.

You apply for a job at $q. All of your friends have been telling linkedin you're good at $r. You have no profile at linkedin. You show up at the interview. They say, "Well you have lots of $r experience, but we consider that wasted time, you probably picked up bad habits doing $r. We want someone who's spend more time on $q than $r and who doesn't lie about fermented dairy and alkaloids."

How do I come up with these scenarios? What is my formula? It's based on an article I once read by a Canadian politician who described the right to privacy as simply the right to not be known before someone actually meets you, to have no false representations before you. (And then I added details about yogurt and caffeine b/c that's what I'm consuming this morning and afternoon.)

I also don't know why I should desire to work at company $q which is has a completely incompetent hiring department.

And governments are pretty good at progroms and determining ethnicities without using social media platforms - they've done this literally since dawn of time. If you add this scenario, you'll need to add the increased sharing of information about the government that is happening through facebook and the fact that governments are banning access to social media whenever they are up to something shady.

> the right to privacy as simply the right to not be known before someone actually meets you

Then you need to ban gossip as well.

Then you should not try getting a job at all, since many companies have similarly incompetent HR departments, which gather background information on you that you might not otherwise wish for them to use when weighing your application.

Companies that care about their employee's choice of fermented milk will go not be a good place to work at, regardless of Facebook. And they will have serious competitive disadvantages.

The pendulum is swung our way right now. Put yourself in the position of someone going for a job in a market that's tight and competitive.

(Like trying to rent a place in Sydney or NYC, they can discard you and there'll be plenty of people left lining up to take your place.)

That's precisely the thing - effective society does ban gossip. Sure, it doesn't get rid of it 100%, but it recognizes it as a harmful thing and stigmatizes it. It does not meekly accept that because some gossip exists and cannot be eradicated, all should be free to gossip however much they like.

I actually like to see good ads online too and often find them useful. For most people, trading some data for better ads and free services is a deal that they're willing to make - most people don't have the mentality of RMS. I might be willing to trade some data about myself voluntarily so I'll see some ads about products I might actually buy instead of ads for viagra and other penis-related things.

What Facebook and Google is doing here would not be nearly as troubling without this NSA data collection stuff. As annoying as online advertising can sometimes be, generally that information that companies gather about people from online ads isn't going to wreck anybody's life in any serious way and there are always ad-blockers and things to use to limit that if a site is annoying you.

But if the NSA's algorithms use some random meta-data and Facebook likes and search keywords to somehow determine that you're a potential "terrorist sympathizer" or something and you get placed on some no-fly or watch list with no recourse, that can put your livelihood or ultimately even your life in danger. We don't yet know the full extent of these programs or how the data is used and I'm not trusting the same politicians that hid this from us and lied to us and have always lied to us for more power.

The groundwork is in place for the next politicians that come into power that are unlimited by ambition to create a nearly perfect political dictatorship. This isn't a situation we should be in.

While privacy and the mess regarding the NSA are problems, to be sure, I'd like to suggest the real problem with facebook is trying to be the ultimate middleman in society. They have the potential to become the worst "rent seeking" business we have ever seen.

Crap like their embed-in-any-webpage login and comment services are good examples of how they seduce people into their walled garden. I've already seen websites that only supported facebook logins, and one "trendy" restaurant in SF that only accepted their payment service.

Worst of all, most people seem to be able to separate the middleman threat (when it is acknowledged at all) from the privacy threat. Even when talking to friends that should know better (several engineers, one bio PhD), any time I bring up the subject. The response is _always_ something about how they don't give facebook their REAL information anyway or similar privacy-based argument. They are assisting in the creation of yet another long-term barrier-to-entry and can't even see it.