Facebook or Spybook?
I don’t think there is anybody in the civilized world over the age of 10 who hasn’t heard of Facebook. It’s an online phenomenon that calls itself “A social utility connecting people with friends and others who work, study, and live around them.”
Specifically, it is a social networking website launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Harvard roommates and computer science students: Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Fast forward six years: the website now has over 400 million active users, which have put Zuckerberg and company in the Forbes list of the world’s richest people.
Facebook has become a universal language. In the ‘90s, people used to say, “I’ll call you,” to mean they will keep in touch. At the turn of the millennium, they started saying, “I’ll text you.” Now, it’s more along the lines of, “I’ll Facebook you.” Facebook is now both a noun and a verb. It is a medium. It is a culture. It is a world. It is an effective, immediate and powerful means of communication but more importantly, it doesn’t cost anything: it is free. Facebook unites people with common interests. It bridges time and distance gaps. It builds new relationships and mends broken ones. So, for all the powers and conveniences that Facebook affords its users, one must use it prudently and responsibly.
Entertainment Weekly magazine put Facebook on its end-of-the-decade “best-of” list, saying, “How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”
Precisely! The operative word here might be “stalk.” This is the ugly side of such a powerful tool.
We’ve heard horror stories of spurned lovers stalking their exes via the website. But this is collateral damage — as each member signs up, he or she compromises his privacy to a certain degree. Not that anybody much cares. This is the reason the term “Facebook Generation” was coined, to refer to an entire generation of people who live to share personal information with the rest of the world via the Internet. “Personal information exhibitionism” is what I call it because of the obvious delight in the exercise — a kind of high that has proved addicting to millions.
“It is a battleground,” a friend said of Facebook’s notoriety for being used as ground zero from which to launch psychological warfare on those within — or outside of — our ambit.
It affords mistresses a means by which to stake whatever little claim they have on their married paramours by plastering their sites with photos of themselves latching on to their sugar daddies using the death grip: holding hands or locked in a sticky embrace, hoping for the wives to discover them one way or another and up and leave, so that they can be elevated to “wife” status.
It is the most convenient way for jealous wives and girlfriends to spy on their partners without having to leave the comfort of their rooms. Gone are the days when suspicious women had to trail their partners all over town to get a handle on their whereabouts. Now, all they have to do is follow the post or photo trail on Facebook to figure out how their partners spend their precious time and money.
Facebook serves as a character reference for future employers. All they need do is comb through an applicant’s site and determine what kind of a life he or she leads and determine if his or her lifestyle is a good fit to the company’s mission and vision. The same goes for current employers who wish to look in on an employee’s personal life for whatever reason. With one click of the finger, one’s entire life is exposed.
Of course the conveniences that Facebook provides are revolutionary. The instant connectivity that it brokers to people in every corner of the globe is priceless.
But, by its very nature, it is not without its perils. We know the Internet to be the most democratic of forums, so that anybody but anybody who has access to it may sign up on Facebook. He could be the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper or your garden variety predator but as long as he can reinvent himself as a harmless, likable persona, he can charm others into “friending” him (a Facebook term for linking up with another person, and allowing them access to your account) and in he goes into an endless network of gullible people, scoring a window into their very private lives — their very souls.
Yes, there are a few levels of built-in security measures onsite that, by the way, are not difficult to breach. All information posted is fair game so enter at your own risk.
The list of victims of the danger that lurks within the networks of Facebook is endless. There are the teenage victims of cyber bullies, some of whom resorted to taking their own lives because of severe emotional trauma. There are the reported kidnap victims whose daily routines were established courtesy of their posts. But the more curious ones are those whose stories follow.
A married man was supposedly conducting an affair with a “proper” woman whom he had never suspected of being capable of such a thing. He claimed he wasn’t serious with her, that he was simply bored at home and was looking to have a good time, except that he was waiting for a graceful exit so as not to agitate the her as she was showing signs of resistance to disengage.
So she did what she needed to: while at a party with him, she waited after he had had several drinks. She then asked her friend to take photos of them in compromising poses. He, who normally possesses infallible discretion in such matters, was mentally impaired, so he was oblivious to said photo ops. The next day, photos of them were plastered on the girlfriend’s Facebook site. She made sure that through the six-degrees-of-separation rule, they got to the wife in no time at all. Did she get what she wanted in the end? Of course not! She simply gave her very married boyfriend the best excuse to scamper away.
And then there was this discontented married man who lived abroad with wife and child. His means of escape was Facebook so he spent an inordinate amount of time on it, tracking down his exes who still lived in Manila. Rumor has it that he had sent identical suggestive messages over a period of time to them — all of whom were married as well — and waited patiently for whoever would take the bait first. Eventually, one gave in. So he uprooted himself and came back home to Manila and announced to his wife that he was leaving her for his ex-girlfriend, who had also left her family for the same reason.
The latest victim is this woman who had all the while been publicly accusing her husband of cheating. In the meantime, she was the one conducting a long-distance affair with an ex-boyfriend who lived abroad with his family. Well, the husband stumbled upon precious evidence of their affair through Facebook. He was able to establish that his wife was having a rendezvous with the boyfriend in Hong Kong at such and such a weekend at a posh hotel overlooking the harbor to the tune of US$500 per night. Date, time and place of the tryst were clearly spelled out via posts on the couple’s accounts.
While his wife was in Hong Kong, already shacked up with the boyfriend, he sent her a message saying, “Have a great time in Hong Kong with your boyfriend and enjoy the view of the harbor from the hotel.”
In a state of panic after having received the text message, the couple both posted false messages on their sites in an effort to mislead the husband, claiming that, yes, they both were in Hong Kong at the same time, but in different hotels; they added pronouncements of deep regret that they had failed to meet up.
They chose the wrong man to play mind games with, though, because he found a way to get to their personal chat messages and was able to obtain word for word transcripts of several very incriminating series of exchanges with graphic sexual content that proved that they were in fact together in Hong Kong doing what they shouldn’t have been doing.
There is no denying it; they cannot claim that they weren’t the ones who put up those posts. Each Facebook member has their own password and, although one can breach security and look in on other people’s sites, it is illegal to post on behalf of another member, not even if he is a Facebook officer.
Tragic. But such are the dangers of conducting private affairs in public forums. Never use Facebook with malice because it is bound to bite back with lethal venom. Sure, the site dangles a million and one conveniences and forms of entertainment to the average Joe but remember: enter at your own risk.
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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.
