Which is fine if there is alternative phone companies to use. It's their service, their right to determine what it is used for.
Your statement brings to mind the monopolistic phone companies that many areas have where there is no choice so them limiting your usage seriously impedes on your ability to communicate. This isn't the case with Facebook. If they don't want you to talk about Lamebook then fine, it is their service and their systems. You are free to do it over email, IM, or one of the billions of other sites that are fine with it.
The thing is, if you don't have contact information for the person through another medium, then Facebook has a de-facto monopoly on your communication with that person. And Facebook actively prevents you from extracting contact information from Facebook in order to use in other services; you can only extract contact information for communicating through their messaging system.
Network effects matter. The privacy and censorship concerns people have about Facebook are for good reasons.
Unfortunately, there are many people with whom my only contact is Facebook. For almost all intents and purposes, these people don't use email, much less IM.
Enjoy your ivory tower. It's going to be interesting when we're laughing at articles entitled "Facebook to rival Google" only because we were so silly as to discount them at one time. It's going to be interesting when it becomes more and and more a defacto communication tool among younger generations.
For those who are growing up with siblings who in highschool have Facebook accounts and no email address, it's concerning to see Facebook so easily, and for such petty reasons, censor EVEN PRIVATE communications using their site.
Am I saying they have to not censor, no. Am I saying someone should (be able to) stop them, heck no. I'm saying I've not made my peace with the idea yet. How easy would it be for COICA to pass, Facebook to be white-listed, etc, etc.
(Bless Wyden's soul that at least COICA itself is dead for now).
I think your accusation of me being in an ivory tower is more than a bit unfair. You agree with all my points after that.
Yes, your younger siblings only have Facebook accounts but there is nothing stopping them from creating alternative means of communications except for a(tiny) level of effort.
It's far different from a situation with a local phone monopoly.
I don't even know the argument here anymore. Everyone accepts that Facebook should be allowed to censor whatever they want. If you are mad at the general populations acceptance of that face then that is fine but you have to accept that the great majority of people don't and won't ever care about these issues. At most they will complain for a day or two than forget about it.
Nothing on Facebook is private so saying they censor private conversations is wrong. They censor conversations using their medium.
I had to wiki COICA(not american) but I fail to see what this has to do with this discussion. Could you provide some context that I maybe missed from my wikipedia reading?
