InformAction Forums

I'm a newbie here, so I ask for tolerance if this is overworked. There's a lot to read and learn here!
I'm a lifelong geek and still learn new tech, but the toys of my youth were vacuum tubes, big transformers and lots of solder, not jQuery and mySQL.

Personally, I'm ambivalent about .. well, franky wary.. of Face Book. I do 'succumb' to it occasionally, but always with angst and disdain since I got Firebug and saw for myself how much information it snatches up in general
and moreover, insinuates itself into many other websites by handling their readers' comments section via I-frame, I believe.

Often I want to leave a comment or helpful tip on some page. Microsoft's user-driven help pages (yeah, we're their free labor) are a good example.

What's the consensus here about Face Book in general and specifically, about placing comments on various websites to help others at the cost of letting Face Book poke its nose in wherever you're doing?

We Boomers are starting to abdicate now; at 63 I'm integral to that loud-mouthed anti-everything generation that got incensed about encroaching on citizens' privacy (as well as everything imaginable), if only for what things could lead to down the road. Our folks all told us of seeing such horrors before we were born.
Coming from that, I can't help but feel concern for those younger.. is it ignorance? Soma? or a pervasive sense of complete powerlessness? So much has gone with the wind already.

You're all the choir, so why preach? But I do need others' viewpoints.
It just does my heart good to see some younger than I who also have their eyes open. I assume (and hope) that the majority of you computer savants are far younger than I. There needs to always be a critical mass of people shining a torch in dark corners and bucking intrusion on all levels.
If not, it's that slippy slide down .

Unfortunately, usurping control, money and the freedom of others is one of those uglier but eternal qualities of human nature.

So, who thinks what about Face Book?

mastorer
los ángeles

Moved to Web Tech.

I personally wouldn't go near it, nor near any of the gadgets it puts on other sites. Start with the Wikipedia article on it, then do a web search for how many times it's been hacked, how they have grossly misused user data, including unauthorized use of usernames listed as "endorsing" a certain product, etc.

But then, while I'm not quite of your age, I'm from that generation, the one that didn't think one should post one's personal business for all the world to see - or steal.

ETA: Today's young people have become accustomed to searches of their backpacks or walking through a metal detector before entering a school, have been convinced that online friends are a complete substitute for real-life friendships, and hence think it perfectly normal, or desirable, to broadcast one's life to the world. What clever marketing hype -- and parents don't stop it. IMHO. YMMV.