Rockville Central To Become Facebook-Only News Outlet

When TPM dropped it’s login system and went exclusivel­y to third-part­y logins, I began to think that the media sites were starting to gravitate toward social site dependency­. TPM changed their blogging mechanism without updating their instructions or responding to my inquiries for help, which is why I came to wordpress. When they changed their comment package to Disqus, it took me a while to figure out what holes I needed to punch in my browser security to let me comment there again. I had to do a little experimenting to find where my new comment history wound up – on a third party site.

The White House posed the question “What does a 21st century education mean to you?” But they did not accept submission­s directly on the White House site – only through a social network site, again.

The local Dept. of Transporta­tion did a survey – on facebook only.

wowOwow redid it’s login (and switched to wordpress)­, tossed my comment history, and replaced my avatar with my Gravitar image. No more site-speci­fic avatar for them. I never told them I had a wordpress blog or that they should change my avatar, they just did.

Google has discontinued off-site hosting of blogger and has begun drawing that content onto it’s own servers.

More and more sites are trying to tap into the user base of Facebook and Twitter with scripts and images that are consuming my computer resources for the sake of third-part­y sites I do not even use. amazonaws.com, disqus.com, fbcdn.com, googleapis.com, ytimg.com; third-party APIs are becoming ubiquitous.

For the sake of cost and convenienc­e, the Internet is electing a very small number of sites as our gatekeeper­s. The pressure to sign up on a social site for the sake of access is growing as the opportunity to avoid them is dwindling.

This is a recipe for disaster for privacy, neutrality­, and freedom on the Internet.  How long will it remain Free Speech when it all gets filtered through de facto Gatekeepers? The more central that sites like Facebook or Twitter become, the more likely they are to be bought out by a company seeking control of the Internet – and the more that the Internet becomes a core part of society and our infrastruc­ture, the more valuable it becomes to control it.

Think “New World Order.”
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

And:

• Facebook in Privacy Breach
• Facebook Faces Congressional Privacy Interrogation
• http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
• Facebook To Share Users’ Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites

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