Facebook stonewalls on privacy questions

Facebook's been in a lot of hot water lately, what with the much-discussed privacy issues facing the social media giant. 

I'd had my moment in writing about the issue, as I went so far as to shut down my Facebook account after a bout with spyware from the site and this increasingly snaky feeling that Facebook doesn't really give a rip about user privacy.

Anyway, Facebook folks had a major meeting this afternoon to discuss these issues. Whether this meeting involved mass executions, I have no idea. Yet.

It seems Facebook is bringing stonewalling to an art form.

This account is from ReadWriteWeb, a source I trust on tech matters:

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Facebook Clams Up After Meeting on Privacy: 

As we reported yesterday, Facebook's high and mighty summoned unto them their employees, to talk about the savage beating they've been taking in the media, on blogs and among users, big and basic. The meeting, held at 4:00 pm PST has produced no audible results ... when we asked a Facebook spokesman about the meeting we got the same boilerplate as every other organization:

"We have an open culture and it should come as no surprise that we're providing a forum for employees to ask questions on a topic that has received a lot of outside interest."

But wait, there's more:

In an e-mailed statement to Computerworld, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said, 'We had a productive discussion where comments were made and questions were asked and answered" ... Noyes declined, however, to say if the social networking giant made any decisions about changing its contentious privacy policies or if the meeting was simply to allow employees to ask questions about the brouhaha that has arisen over them.

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Looks like Facebook is trying its level best to screw things up here. See, they were on top for some time. Reduced Friendster into a trivia question, and stripped MySpace of all relevance.

Facebook became the only game in town.

When you're the only game in town, you get caught up in Hubris real easily. And as the ancient Greeks so tiresomely remind us, that's when Nemesis hands you your bee-hind. 

Oh, yeah. I have not restarted with Facebook. Nor do I plan to. I'm sure my old Facebook friends would understand, and it's not like social media is the only way we keep in contact.

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