They already do. I believe a law was passed in 1791 that states I can reveal any damned thing I want about myself or my kids, regardless of how idiotic it may be.
Welcome to America. Enjoy your stay.
Only reason I ever got on FB was my prior company (Sprint) insisted that employees create accounts and begin “liking” and pushing products. I created the account just so I could say I did, but never “liked” anything.
As the years went by, people I went to school would send friend requests, even thought I hardly knew who half of them were. I wasn’t your friend in high school, why I am suddenly a long lost soul mate in FBworld?
I still have an account. For one reason and one reason only. So that on my wife’s FB page, my name shows up under “Married to”. Not that we are paranoid or anything, just that she doesn’t want to answer questions from her FB friends about why my name disappeared, which it would if I deleted my account altogether.
I hate FB, hate the way it’s wormed it’s way into our society. Some studies have shown that FB is mentioned as a cause (not necessarily the primary cause) in 66 percent of divorce cases in the last 5 years.
The average FB user spends 700 minutes on the site each month. Wow, imagine if you actually used that time to, I don’t know, go out with friends in real life, or exercised, or took a class, whatever. :smack:
I’m with the OP, I think FB is a blight on our society. Unfortunately one we have spread to other countries as well.
EDIT: I just read my post, and basically talked myself into quitting Facebook, once and for all. Took about a minute, Done
Note quite. Facebook is cited in 20% of divorces in the US. It makes up 66% of all “online evidence” in divorce cases. You’ve conflated the two statistics.
I’m pretty sure this is incorrect as well, since I can’t find an original source. The bloggers I found repeating this seem to point back to this, because the bloggers that cite 700 minutes average use also use the 130 friends and 500 million active users stats. Unless I’m reading it wrong, that’s 500 million users at 700 million minutes per month, which works out to an average of 1.4 minutes per month. Based on what I know about how facebook counts an “active user,” that seems about right.
eta: Well, apparently if you use a more realistic definition of active user, you get around 7-8 hours a month on FB. That’s using stats from independent firms, not Facebook’s own inflated numbers for number of users.
And yet, if your legal name happens to be mine, their software does not allow you to use it. Each of my cousins has a different distortion of our lastname. My firstname isn’t acceptable either.
Jeez, what did your parents name you? Fuck McMotherfucker? Or is it just the Spanish spellings aren’t recognized by FB?
Has then been a court case yet where the employer says you have to get a facebook account and the employee says hells no?
If not, sure seems like one should be coming soon.
I fucking hate Facebook. It’s a “walled garden”, a return to the Bad Old Days of AOL and Compuserve. It encourages people who use it to both assume that everyone uses it and assume that, once they post something there, that they’ve made it accessible to everyone. Fuck you, I use the Internet! When I choose to make something available to the public, it’s available to everyone, not just the people on Facebook! I have a company, and have been pretty much forced to create a Facebook account for it. But if you make one, yet choose to not have a personal account, the company account is nearly useless.
The full legal form is eight words. If I use the usual abbreviation for the four-word firstname, it all gets down to five words: still too many for FB. That’s without middle names, those four words are my firstname. Paternal lastname is three words. I once had a coworker who, without middle names, had a nine-word full name: three-word firstname, three-word first lastname, three-word second lastname.
Is your name Didi Tellyouimfromspain?
Well, that’s okay. You’re not subject to the jurisdiction of US courts. 
No, but the Spanish version of FB’s legal agreement, the one subject to the jurisdiction of the Spanish courts, DOES say you have to use your full legal name.
The most ugly issue I have with the fb ads and “liking” stuff is that people are so willing to turn themselves into whores for products I’m sure they don’t even care about. “Suzie and 16 other friends like Applebees!”
Really, Suzie let herself be a walking billboard for Applebees? Probably to get an extra cow on her farmville or something like that. People are letting themselves be used by businesses, and what’s worse, are willing to provide targeted endorsements to their friends.
It’s like a more insidious and infinitely easier version of door-to-door knife sales.
Does Spain have a law against unauthorized access of a computer or website?
Yeah, depending on how it’s done it would count as “identity stealing”, or as “using a false identity” (which is not the same as a pseudonym - those are ok). On a professional setting items such as password sharing are a fireable offense in pretty much every company. And agreeing to use your full legal name, then not using it, is a breach of contract, although in FB’s case it’s being caused by FB’s own inability to accept a large amount of Hispanic legal names so people are actually in the clear… still, it’s something you could be taken to court for (and which would take money and time before getting tossed), and used often in Spanish IT environments as an example of a badly-implemented rule.
Hmm, looks like my source did as you suggested, and mixed up their stats. Here is the site I was quoting. Regardless, still not a good thing, just not as bad percentage wise.
For the number of minutes per month, yeah, there are lots of numbers out there, that are all over the board. I would be willing to bet the average minutes per “active” FB member is closer to the 8 hours + end of the scale, but that is so hard to capture.
Nonetheless, I personally see/saw little to no value in investing time in FB. Obligatory Youtube link
Well, one of the fundamental tenets of capitalism is that people are rational actors seeking to maximise their utility (and in a free market with full information, will successfully do so). Advertising tends to exploit cognitive biases in order to prevent people from thinking rationally. Forms roughly 9% of US GDP, too. If you want more info on this framework, check out Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model.
This is great news. Thank you for posting it. I admit i havent tried to leave in a while, but if this does indeed work, i may rid myself of the cancer that is facebook.
The employer shit bothers me. Force me to make and use a fb account and spread good cheer about their company? What is this, the 7th fucking grade?
Bad news is that employers (actually HR Depts are starting tomuse oir facevookmaccount to get a better idea od the person uounare nefore hiring you. This doesnt surprise me that much, since HR people are idiots, and need somerhing to justify their time surfing on the net.
I remember when i hqd to choose between fb and myspace. I actually created an account on myspace first, but everyone else wqs on facebook. I got lured by all the cool kids. I dont even know one person that uses myspace any longer.
I can believe that fb has played a part in a number of divorces too. Some high school romance gets rekindled, the peopel get together after twenty years and blammo. Divorce…
Facebook serves as an excellent marketing tool for organizations mainly because so many people use the social networking site. If you want to raise awareness about certain products, Facebook is your safest bet.
Would I use it to keep in touch with people? No. Definitely not. It’s the perfect recipe for disaster because you can ruin your reputation for saying something moronic and in bad taste. Everything I say via Facebook is property of Facebook. Everything I post via Facebook is property of Facebook. You get the idea.
Would I (as an organizational entity) use social networking to market products? Definitely, because it’s free and has the potential to reach a large audience.
Like
Oh sorry forgot this wasn’t Facebook.
The worst that can happen is they delete your account. Unless you are assuming the identity for some illegal reason. Or you could do what a few friends do. They have a public account. Family, coworkers, acquaintances are on there. Then there is another account with the same name that is locked tight. Not even searchable. You have to be invited. That is for close friends only.