Facebook's power should worry us all

If Facebook was a government agency, its power would be as undisputed as it would be frightening.

For a single organisation to know as much as it does about the habits, interests and behaviour of 10 million Australians is unsettling.
If a government department had so much up-to-the-minute information about who we know, where we have been and what we are doing at its fingertips then one can only imagine the outcry.

And yet here we have a privately-owned company accountable to no one operating with apparent immunity from the law. Aside from the grumbling that invariably attends any changes Facebook makes to its site, no one has yet taken to the streets.

Facebook's power continues to grow (800 million users and counting) and, on the face of it, the only real alternative left open to us is to either beat a retreat into a self-imposed disconnected world or total surrender.  More

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