You might not like it, but you and Facebook are worst friends forever

Annabel Crabb

July 1, 2012

Your funky pal is copyrighting the words Face and Book – and using your life for commercial gain.

THE news last week that Facebook had bumped millions of unsuspecting users onto new and unwanted ”Facebook” email addresses reminded me to remind you of something: Facebook is not your friend.

It’s easy to forget that sometimes, what with all the poking and friending and planking and sending each other imaginary hood ornaments and so forth.

But it’s true. The things that Facebook is prepared to do to you are things you would never accept from an actual friend.

A month ago, when Facebook conducted its mammoth public float, ordinary minnow investors went on an ecstatic acquisitional splurge, being unaware of the downward revision of profit forecasts that was circulated to selected big buyers just before the sale went live. Result: lots of small investors, holding shares worth less than they paid for them.

In human terms, Facebook in this circumstance behaved like a friend who asks you to their garage sale, but keeps the mint-condition Scalextric out the back for their merchant-banker mate. In other words: not a friend.

Also this week, Facebook hesitantly tried (and then swiftly withdrew) a new feature called Find Friends Nearby. This invention – which uses mobile phone GPS systems to identify friends in your geographical area – is a fun idea.

Fun, that is, right up to the point at which the acquaintance who keeps asking you round for a ”catch-up” flicks on his phone and realises that you are not, as claimed, in Laos doing important aid work, but in fact at the Mexican restaurant across the road, messily consuming a burrito. A real friend would never dob you in like that.

In real life, would you stay friends with an extreme control freak?Wired  magazine reported in March that Facebook’s most recent user agreement contains a requirement that Facebook users not use – without express permission under the company’s Brand Usage Guidelines – any of Facebook’s ”copyrights and trademarks”.

Users who made the effort to read on, which means probably nobody at all, might have been surprised to find that Facebook includes, in its list of ”copyrights and trademarks”, the words ”Face” and ”Book”.

This fine-print annexure is full of significance for many, many users. Some of the younger ones might want – in view of the new restrictions on the use of the term ”face” – to think of some other bodily part off which it might be feasible to get at schoolies, so as to render their photographic captions compliant with the Brand Usage Guidelines.

The mere fact that Facebook would claim any form of proprietary right over the word ”book” itself signifies a couple of things.

The final global death throes of humanity’s capacity to identify and appreciate irony, for one. And the other? Facebook is not your friend. What kind of friend would set rules about the words you are and aren’t allowed to use in your conversation with them (apart from the ones – of whom I personally have several – who politely and quite reasonably ask that you not use the word ”moist”, ever, which is completely fine with me)?

You know what else a friend would not do, just while we’re on the topic?

Pass on pictures of you looking like a complete arse, is what.

Such is the pernicious nature of Facebook’s ”crown of thorns starfish” approach to your personal life, you no longer even have to post embarrassing pictures of yourself in order to get them into circulation.

All it takes is for some frenemy or other to post them, and ”tag” you by name in the post. This ensures that, if you do happen to die in a horrible freak accident or get taken hostage while undertaking important aid work in Laos, the photo all the newspapers will use is not going to be the carefully chosen profile shot, locked away in your ”friends-only” Facebook section, where you are for once neither squinting nor looking insane, and your chin is pointing exactly the right way. Rather, you and both your chins will be immortalised holding a blue drink and a cigarette, hair styled into a mullet that no one will ever realise was supposed to be ironic.

A real friend would not want this for you.

But Facebook is such a cool platform, its defenders protest. You can keep in touch with anyone in the world! And it’s free!

Well, of course it’s free. You’re not the customer here, after all. You’re the merchandise. When money changes hands at the butchers, it’s not the sausages who cough up. Facebook’s business model is not about you paying money for it; it’s about other companies paying money for you. Information about your habits, your tastes, the 25 Random Things About Me that you keep typing in. The fact that you’re renovating, or having a baby. The fact that you have a Britney Spears earworm, or cannot stop eating processed cheese slices. A real friend wouldn’t capitalise on these moments of weakness. But Facebook is not your friend.

 ¢â€“  Annabel Crabb writes for ABC Online’s The Drum, at abc.net.au/thedrum, and tweets as @annabelcrabb.