"Is this the Facebook we all signed up for?" asks the hipster VJ interviewer from his desk inside the office command center on HuffPo live, a digital interview show with Skyped-in guests.
The topic is Graph Search, the new Facebook tool that mines subscriber uploads for data useful in research, dating, stalking, etc.
The guests include an activist, a philosopher, a BuzzFeeder, and a token ex-Facebook user, art world tech whiz Barry Hoggard, who makes the best contributions despite being patronized by the show's host because, eh, everyone pretty well has to be on Facebook at this point.
The NYC-based Hoggard, who runs the ArtCat artists' web hosting service, among other projects (recap here), points out that as a host (predating Facebook) he made certain pledges to customers not to exploit their data: "it would never occur to me to change my privacy policy every few months in order to increasingly use the data that people had given to me, when I was promising that I would do very little with that data. I just don't feel it's an ethical way for a company to behave."
Ethics, gulp. You can almost hear the gears grinding in the heads of the other panelists. "We have to talk about ethics, now? In connection with this service we all use and promote? What are ethics, even?"