About That Facebook Login Icon

Happy Easter or Passover or whatever you may be celebrating today. In our home, today was Chris sitting on the couch recovering from food poisoning day. I did most of my suffering between 2 AM and 6 AM, so I was able to enjoy a traditional Easter ham dinner with the family this evening. I guess I'm on the way to feeling normal again.

How many different web sites or mobile apps do you log into by simply clicking the Facebook icon and granting the app or site whatever permissions it wants on your FB account? FB is in many ways becoming our default ID online. I don't think that is a good thing. In fact, I can think of a few very real scenarios where it could be bad.

An employer could require you to register your FB login as part of the application process. Then FB could sell them data about your usage. If you are a young woman and have been "liking" parenting related stuff on FB it could be a warning flag to the company that you intend to be pregnant soon, and a reason for them to not hire you. Of course, they'd never admit to that.

Your credit rating could be impacted by Facebook. What if FB had data that people that liked the Wild Turkey whiskey page on FB were 32% more likely to default on their mortgage? Now imagine you liked the Wild Turkey page, it doesn't even matter if you drink the stuff. Maybe it was part of a contest entry 2 years ago. How much would the credit reporting agencies pay for that kind of data?

What would your health insurance do with the data is could collect on you from FB?

And most ominously, imagine an authoritarian government forcing Facebook to give it access so they could use it to root out people engaged in seditious activities against the state.

Facebook has the potential to do a whole lot of evil with the data they are collecting on all of us. And when their growth slows, as it has to eventually, they'll have motivation to use that data for more than trying show us more and more ads.