Theres a whole bunch of other such websites

None of which my family and friends use.

theres emails

I use it with my mother and that is about it. Sites are better and the only one they all use is Facebook.

you could use the phone

From Japan? Paying long-distance charges and keeping conversations as short as possible is not the way to stay in touch.

in worst case you can bring a letter to the post office.

And deal with Japanese postal workers? No thank you. I’d rather post on a wall. Simple, fast, no charge, and no need to explain things in Japanese.


L. Spiro

I'm okay with companies using my information for marketing and whatever, provided they are clear and upfront about what they're doing with it and I've expressly permitted it.

I didn't get this email, but I've also set my privacy controls on Facebook to max and have disabled all apps and turned their app platform off. I've also disabled allowing me in social ads. I also never "like" anything on any site (I'll "like" friend's posts and pictures), and I use Disconnect on Chrome.

I've got mixed feelings of "it's someone's own fault if they don't take a few minutes to disable things and tune their privacy settings to what they want" and "Facebook (and pretty much everyone else) is being sneaky and sly, and I don't like it." People argue it's hard to turn up your privacy controls, but honestly, it's not that hard.

L. Spiro, Skype is a free online phone software thing that you can use to speak with your mother for like forever without any cost besides the usually monthly internet fee. My wife is from China and we use it to speak with our Chinese family and friends all the time free of charge. Call when you want to some one's Skype account and the two computers will hook up and both of you can then speak for free. I and my wife never use facebook due to all the other so much more great options out there.

Type Skype and you shall see a world of free internet phoning

I'm okay with companies using my information for marketing and whatever, provided they are clear and upfront about what they're doing with it and I've expressly permitted it.

I didn't get this email, but I've also set my privacy controls on Facebook to max and have disabled all apps and turned their app platform off. I've also disabled allowing me in social ads. I also never "like" anything on any site (I'll "like" friend's posts and pictures), and I use Disconnect on Chrome.

I've got mixed feelings of "it's someone's own fault if they don't take a few minutes to disable things and tune their privacy settings to what they want" and "Facebook (and pretty much everyone else) is being sneaky and sly, and I don't like it." People argue it's hard to turn up your privacy controls, but honestly, it's not that hard.

There's a difference between harvesting my actions for research (Netflix or Amazon for example, for better recommendations to their user base, or better ad sales, for example), harvesting my personal information to sell to third parties, and using my identity to sell products to other people publicly (which, as I mentioned earlier, hadn't happened to me).

And it's nice to say, "yeah, just opt-out of that". But if there is no way to opt-out until Facebook settled the lawsuit, then that doesn't really hold water.

However, my understanding of the nature of the Facebook's feature was skewed. I heard on a respectable news site (Well, alright, it was Yahoo!, so almost respectable ) that someone had their Facebook profile associated with a 55 gallon container of lubricant and was used to market it without their knowledge.

What really happened, I've now found out, is that the person themselves posted the 55 gallon container on their Facebook page, and Facebook just highlighted the post in other feeds and linked to the product on Amazon, which is much less extreme (Here's the guy's article on it). The way it was initially phrased on Yahoo! made it sound to me (from a lack of details) that Facebook just associated a random user with a potentially embarrassing product to market it in ads when the user had nothing to do with it - but that's not what actually happened.