Mark Zuckerberg Is TIME Magazine's Person of the Year
Mark Zuckerberg is TIME Magazine's Person of the Year? Where's the "dislike" button? — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

  

  
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      Published on
    
    Dec 20, 2010 03:11 PM
  

  

  

  

  



                   TIME Magazine praises Mark Zuckerberg for creating a system that has
connected people around the world with each other.
                
            
As for Person of the Year, we couldn't find the dislike button on
Facebook for TIME's choice, so we made our own. Here's our version of
the magazine: 
 



 
Unfortunately, the terms under which he claims to have done this set a terrible precedent for our future — for our control over the
software we use to interact with each other, for control over our
data, and for our privacy. The damage is not limited to Facebook users. Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and
foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers. 
 
This much is evident from Facebook's outward behavior — but things
could actually be much worse than we know. Facebook's users are not
connecting directly with each other. They are speaking to Mr.
Zuckerberg, who first writes down and files away everything said, and
then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In
some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's
messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in
them, because those links point to services which Facebook would
prefer we not discuss. 
 
Fortunately, there are many efforts underway to provide
distributed, user-controlled services to facilitate connection
between people, including GNU social, Mastodon, and
Diaspora. (The
Free Software Directory offers an up-to-date listing of replacements
for Service as a Software Substitute, including a
comprehensive listing of free software-based social network
services.) These services will not have the same kinds of
problems, because both the communication-handling code and the
communication data will be in the hands of the people doing the
communicating.
 
These efforts will eventually succeed. We hope that when they do, TIME
will remedy its mistaken reasoning by awarding the Person of the Year
appropriately. 
 
 

Copy and paste this code for your own website!

<a href="https://www.fsf.org/fb"><img src="https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/no-facebook-me.png" alt="Not f'd — you won't find me on Facebook" /></a>
 
In the meantime, you can encourage people not to connect with
Zuckerberg while thinking that they are connecting with you, by
putting this button on your blog or web site, with a link to whatever
method you would prefer they use to contact you directly — maybe your
https://identi.ca or other status.net account.  
 
Alternatively, you could point it at this post or any of the better
articles pointing out the problems with Facebook, such as "With
friends like these
..." by
Tom Hodgkinson, or the resources available at http://autonomo.us (this is a web archive link) —
especially the "Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network
Services". 
 
Our button, of course, is not linked to any surveillance database or tracking system.  
 
Note: You may find some pages about the FSF or GNU on Facebook, since anyone can create pages there. Know that these pages are unofficial and not maintained by FSF staff or the GNU Project, nor did we ask for them to be created.


Download our dislike button and put it on your website, or print your own dislike stickers. 

All buttons released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Please feel free to change the buttons, but keep both of the creator names intact, and make sure your buttons are under the same license.
 
 

            
        