Time Magazine’s May 31 issue will hit newsstands with a cover and feature story dedicated to the “scary” side of Facebook.The cover art pays homage to the Facebook generation with a mosaic of 1,295 Facebook profile photos, accompanied by a blurb from the feature article: “Facebook …and how it’s redefining privacy. With nearly 500 million users, Facebook is connecting us in new (and scary) ways.”
The feature article by Dan Fletcher delves inside Facebook and its methodologies for hooking new users and explores the historical events leading up to present-day privacy concerns around Open Graph and instant personalization.
At first glance, the feature story appears less critical than the cover makes it out to be. But Fletcher lends a sharp eye to Facebook’s grand vision and enormous growth, and eventually concludes that Facebook is on the path to become “the Web’s sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.”
Although Time Magazine no longer has the same distribution it once did, the print piece — with its online duplicate — is bound to get traction from a very mainstream audience. Unfortunately for Facebook, it looks like the controversy around its approach to user privacy isn’t going away anytime soon.
Mashable
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