You can skip my rant and just watch the video.

I was just saying on Twitter how amazing it is to me that people are so eager to receive junk mail & advertising. I mean if someone asks for your name and address you get defensive about your privacy, unless they throw the words “Social Network” in front of their proposal.

Now we have people out there calling themselves professionals who are labeled Social Marketing experts. The job is to advertise the company they work for on social networks like twitter, facebook, etc. The name of the game is exposure. Forget quality interactions, lets just see how many fans we can get on our Facebook fan page because that means more customers! Let us worship our all mighty god QUANTITY!! As consumerism is our religion, MORE is our goal.

The folks who lampooned twitter have called out the LinkedIn in the following video.

via iheartchaos

via On the Media

I for one welcome our Google overlords, but I’ll complain about my privacy everywhere else. Of course I don’t care either way, I just want to fit in with everyone else so I have to be a hypocrite.

via my tweep, GRBrit

via Gizmodo: “John Hargrave tracked down Verizon CEO’s private address and cellphone number. Then he went to his home—megaphone in hand—to ask him to stop Verizon’s lousy privacy policies.”

Is it disturbing that one man was able to get this information easily online? Is it frustrating that corporate America can’t be trusted with your private information?

Perhaps the most upsetting part of the whole story is the fact that he is one man with a megaphone and a video camera. WAKE UP AND TAKE TO THE STREETS, PEOPLE! Take the country back from the lobbyists and corrupt politicians, this guy can’t do it on his own.

Nobody likes Big Brother following him around with cameras, satellites, GPS and such. However, if you get a marketing team together and convince people they want GPS enabled devices to tell their friends which bar they are at, you get mindless drones who just want more of their privacy invaded! Capitalism at work. Let’s look at modern day telling of Little Red Riding Hood as an example, shall we:

Seriously, I am thinking about joining the movement. Forget the privacy issues that I have pondered in the past, it comes down to usability. From the article:

I’m going to have to ponder whether MySpace (or Facebook for that matter) is indeed the best walled garden for my profile data to sit in. They do provide an element of convenience for tracking people down you need to talk to. On the other hand, it is getting increasingly difficult to squeeze out usability between the multiple layers of excruciating monetization they try to throw into their systems.

Makes sense to me. Follow the link, read more, delete your account on the 30th. If you don’t have an account, use one of my email aliases and start an account just to delete it later!

Thanks to J Dizzle to the Rizzle Fo’ Shizzle for the link.