2010年10月17日星期日

A non-conspiracy theory of my little Facebook incident

Yesterday I talked about my Facebook account was temporarily because Facebook found out the birthday information was fake (see this article).

Now after some pondering, perhaps I can provide a non-conspiracy theory to this little incident. Perhaps Facebook does not really know my real birthday. What they know is only that the birthday information is fake. This can happen if they detect the date I gave them is out-of-range (e.g. Jan 1, 1900) or non-existent (e.g. Feb 29, 1971).

Frankly speaking I forgot what date I told them.

Actually, I hope the above explanation is true. It is a very scary thought that Facebook can know my real birthday with doing any serious investigative work.

In any case, as Facebook becomes more and more useful (and hence powerful), we should be watchful for what Facebook can do (or could have done). We need check and balance in this society. If any single entity becomes too powerful, then the chance of abuse will be elevated. This is true to government, to media, to Google, to Microsoft, to the pre-1984 AT&T (before it was broken up by the US Government in 1984 by anti-trust law, if you remember that), to the US unipolar superpower, and to Facebook.

I still like Facebook. I hope it is just useful, not evil !

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