Recently, the ever-distending social networking site facebook made some quite extensive changes to the way it handles and shares the personal details of its users. You'd be forgiven for failing to have noticed: the changes were made without consultation or forewarning. Who knows what the new privacy settings amount to in practice? The site's explanatory pages are baffling at best.
Users appear to have been returned artfully and irrevocably to the days of carefully catalogued online activities, accessible profiles, open searches and poorly protected personal information; all via a series of unannounced moves made presumably at the behest of online advertisers - the site's sole source of remuneration.
Am I alone in finding this kind of wily underhand alteration a tad unnerving? Who knows where its leading us. Perhaps one day we'll all be wearing cameras on our heads so browsers can follow our lives in realtime. Microphones in parks and pedestrian precincts will be used to make public our private conversations. And our ignominious profile pictures will show us all blotched and mottled, front-on and perfectly naked so that we can each compare the size of our respective sexual organs.
The way things are going, such quantum leaps in internet culture would probably go unnoticed too, for it seems we are an eminently docile generation.
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