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Opinion: Facebook’s free lunch and you

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The news about Facebook’s practice of restricting what information its half-billion members can keep private, and trying to get members to ‘let it all hang out’ on top of that, has left me astonished.

Not by what Facebook did but by members’ reactions.

Hurt. Betrayed. Indignant.

How naive can you get?

Must it bear repeating? There. Is. No. Free. Lunch. Or, as Hansel and Gretel learned, there is no free gingerbread.

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So Facebook is trampling on your privacy and trading on your personal life. What on earth did you expect? Facebook is a company. QED. Did anyone really think Facebook was in this for the cozy ‘Kumbayah’ feeling? And did anyone also believe that Coke really wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony?

No free lunch, no free social networking. All that data about yourself – all that precious, valuable marketing data, about where you live, how old you are, what sites you look at, who you friends are – that is the gold strike, the oil gusher, the diamond mine of social networking.

Did you really believe that Facebook was your big online friend? That it would never, ever try to -- using that au courant verb -- monetize you?

Even if something looks free, even if your wallet doesn’t have to emerge from your pocket, a business that is ‘giving’ you anything is guaranteed to be ‘getting’ a lot more, or it won’t be in business for long.

Even something as apparently inconsequential as those ‘free’ discount and customer-loyalty cards and memberships mean that you get 5 cents off a can of beans -- and the store gets 5 bucks worth of marketing gold about you.

Sure, it’s a trade-off; you just have to calculate what you’re willing to give up -- and you have to wise up about what you’re agreeing to in the first place.

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I talked to Stewart Brand a few months back for my column and asked him which of his many aphorisms keeps getting quoted, or misquoted, back to him. He said it was that line that ‘information wants to be free.’ His original observation was, ‘Information wants to be expensive, and information also wants to be free.’

The Facebook conundrum, neatly done up.

Nothing so elevated came to my mind when I heard about the Facebook privacy incursions and the yowls of reaction.

It was, instead, that ‘Twilight Zone’ episode called ‘To Serve Man.’ Aliens come to Earth and bestow upon humankind a swift, easy and free path to plenty. Hunger ends. Peace reigns. No one questions the aliens’ motives, except for one man who is trying to decipher a book entitled ‘To Serve Man,’ which the aliens have given to the world’s leaders. He too soon gives up and joins the throngs of tourists flying off to visit the aliens’ planet.

He’s boarding the spacecraft when his secretary tries to stop him, hollering what it is they’ve decoded: ‘To Serve Man -- it’s a cookbook!’

So, as you see, there is no free lunch, literally or figuratively. But there is lunch -- and you may be it.

-- Patt Morrison

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