There are variations on the phrase I don’t give a [flying] crap. But apparently that’s not always true. At Facebook, at least, they’ll give one, or throw one, so long as its imaginary and only costs them some personal information.
Go ahead, get it out of your system. It is, quite possibly, another steamy rotten boil in the ongoing decay of Western civilization. Or, if you’re not quite willing to place this new Facebook application above, say, novelty items of the past like fake vomit and whoopee cushions, you might agree that is very silly.
And silly is enough, it seems to separate people from their personal information that will be sold to advertisers looking to target them specifically. A replacement of the traditional “poke” with a virtual, well, crapshoot is in high demand, according to the company that provides that opportunity.
The application, as faithfully relayed by the Channel Register, is called “Food Fight,” and poop is on the menu, as are the proverbial shits-and-giggles to follow.
It’s not so much that you have the opportunity to reconnect with your primate self (an thus, for you alarmists, regress all of humanity) that is somewhat chilling. To throw virtual poop at a friend on Facebook, it’ll cost you twenty virtual dollars, which you’ve earned by telling Social Media, the company that created the app, everything about yourself.
Flush that home with a quote from Social Media CEO Seth Goldstein:
“Imagine that the ads that you saw not only knew who you were, but actually knew your friends, knew your spouse or knew who you were in a relationship with,” Goldstein said. “Now that Facebook and others have exposed that information, there’s an opportunity for ad networks like Social Media to leverage that data and provide the holy grail: personalised advertising.”
Join me as I say ewwwww, that’s kinda dirty.
It’s worse than that for privacy advocates. Users are waiting in line to grab a pile of virtual poop to throw at a friend – 75,000 of them per day, answering around 25 personal questions.
In the end, though, these users don’t have a pot to you-know-what in (sorry, was running out of clichés), as they give up that information of their own volition, and of, we assume, a certain intestinal fortitude that allows them to do so.
