Hey Facebook, gimme my money!
I've been on Facebook since 2008. Eleven Years! The reason was the same as a lot of people in my age range....to stalk check on my children.
Facebook was invented so college age kids could interact with each other. Pretty cool idea. Someone at Harvard, on the east coast, could virtually hang out with someone at Stanford, on the west coast. Then the parents got involved. While we were keeping tabs on our youngsters, we found friends from our past doing the same thing. It was reconnection time.
The adults took over Facebook. Like so many other things, adults ruined a good thing that was meant to make their children's life better. Social media became like youth sports programs. If you don't believe that, spend a few hours at a youth basketball game and listen to a dad yell at a referee who is fifteen years old.
Anyways....I never figured I'd be on Facebook for more than a decade. I thought it would be around a few years and then go away. It would be like My Space, AOL or CompuServe. Yet, here we are in 2020 and Facebook is bigger than ever. Thanks parents. Thanks Zuckerberg. Thanks Russians.
It's not really fun anymore. The kids have mostly left for greener pastures. They found the next new thing. And those who haven't left have slowed their activity on the site. They've left Facebook to older generations. We haven't done such a good job with it. Yeah, we still share pictures, birthdays, anniversaries and our dinners, but we've overloaded it with our political leanings. Check out your feed and see how much anger is out there. It's not Twitter anger yet, but it's close. And, it's going to get worse as we get closer to the election.
I admit to being a big part of the problem. I do more than my share of bitching about Don and the Republicans. Plus, and don't tell anyone, but I use Facebook mostly to share my blog. I know, shocking right? It worked at first, but now Mark Z stopped showing it to people unless you're willing to pay money for that privilege. Thanks Mark, but no thanks.
But in the midst of all this whining, there's some good news, at least if you live in Illinois. The state I live in sued Facebook for privacy violations. Did you know that Facebook has been grabbing all our personal information? Of course you did! I did, too. I figured it came with the territory. Besides, and I admit to being naive about this, I didn't care. Facebook knowing a lot about me and whatever they did with this info was way down the list of my personal worries. If you want to steal my identity, good luck with that after you find out what my life is really like.
The good news, at least for me, is Illinois has one of the strictest biometric privacy laws in the country. Written in 2008, about the same amount of time I've been a Facebook member, it includes protections from information that can be gleaned from facial and iris scans. Facial tagging! I don't understand all of this, or even most of this, but it sounds pretty creepy, doesn't it? Creepy AF!!
A class action suit was filed, claiming that facial tagging violated privacy rights. It was settled for a cool $550 MILLION! That's nice, but I have only one question....WHERE'S MY MONEY?!!!
It's said that five to six million people could be part of the settlement. I know you have to be part of the class action suit, but where do you go to join. Only a few seem to know the answer. The settlement amount is expected to be in the range of $200/person. That works for me. I could buy a very nice meal with that money, or maybe even buy a few of those Facebook ads for my blog? Not likely, but it's a thought. As for the payout distribution date, no one knows. Sigh...a lot of uncertainty about all of this.
Honestly, I don't care much about the technical aspects or the details about this. I only care about one thing...the cold, hard cash!
So Facebook...I've been a faithful customer for the last eleven years. It's time to pay it back! WHERE'S MY MONEY!!? I'm waiting.
Related Post: Eight people who would never rainbow their Facebook profile pictures
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