When all likes lead to Facebook, and liking requires a Facebook account, and Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of potential and chaos -- those attributes which make the technology industry so interesting and competitive. ... it's dishonest to think that the Facebook Open Graph Protocol benefits anyone more than Facebook -- as it exists in its current incarnation, with Facebook accounts as the only valid participants.

As I and others have said before, your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.

Similarly, Facebook isn't collecting and cataloging your consumer preferences out of the good of its heart. Clearly it's planning to deliver targeted advertising based on my Likes; before long, my browser will be chock-full of ads for Bay City Roller reunion tours and Hello Kitty undergarments. The question is, what else will this information be used for, and by whom? Even if today Facebook aggregates and anonymizes this information, there's no guarantee they won't change their minds tomorrow and build nifty little profiles of all Facebook users, down to their favorite breakfast cereals and the deodorant they use.

Each of the 2,583 changes the site has made to its privacy policies since Zucky stole the idea for was divinely inspired to create Facebook has had the net effect of removing more privacy for its users. He's already declared that . There's no reason to expect any of that to change -- Like it or not.

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