Sorry, I’m watching/laughing/partially agreeing with O’Reilly right now.

Today’s Dymersion is about a small piece of old news, that of the controversy over the Facebook mini-feeds. Now, while I agree that the feeds just make finding information all that easier, and Facebook has some responsibility to let people opt-out or remove themselves from the information, some of the things I saw during the period were just disgraceful. Campaigns taking what should be a good cause, and using it to complain about things that just don’t make sense.

Look, the fact is that most information on Facebook is opt-out. You don’t HAVE to provide almost any of the information on there. Likewise, you don’t HAVE to accept anybody as a friend. Heck, you can even set what’s called a “Limited Profile,” and let certain people see less information than your closest friends. Trying to blame Facebook for the information you can control is ignorant. They have two responsibilities in my eyes: 1) Not sharing your information without permission (see below) and 2) Not making that information easier to find than had been already possible.

Like I just said, Facebook has a responsibility not to share information with third parties without permission. So, I was a little angry when I learned of this “developers” program have me opted-in with even asking me. I never got any notice of it, or any screen asking me to opt-out if I didn’t want it. Now, while I understand these are not advertisers, once they have this information, they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. That is ridiculous.

However, other than that, only you can control what people see. Facebook can’t do that for you. What they can do is make sure the information is as difficult as possible to get, without making it too inconvenient. I considered the mini-feed too convenient. Otherwise, it’s up to you.