Tom Hodgkinson leaves Facebook…

.. and my what a statement he makes whilst doing it.  He’s posted an article on the Guardian website today about how he despises Facebook.

Some of it I whole heartedly agree with (lack of privacy, dubious future uses, possibilities for data use), and some of it, I’m not so sure (people can connect with all their friends without Facebook). 

It’s a long article, but well worth the read.  The politics behind the board members (of which there are only 3) are some what worrying.

A couple of snippets to whet your appetite:

“… by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.”

and

“Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”.”