I do not have, nor have I ever had, a Facebook account. I'm not a hipster, nor do I have a damned thing to hide. However, I'm glad I made that choice. Shit, I'm trivial to dox and have been a quasi-public figure for much of my adult life. It's kind of hard to be in a band and be anonymous. You don't just get to climb up on a stage and then tell everyone it's a secret. Coupled with my business, I was the public face for the business until we were able to hire PR staff. Given that I worked with municipalities, I've been on TV, radio, the news, etc... I've had to explain to the public what the project's goals were and how the traffic would change, what the benefits would be, and what they could expect the future to look like with regards to traffic management. So, I'm no stranger to being in public - but this is just fucking creepy. At least in those cases, I was (more or less) choosing to put myself into the public space. I'm not sure who all has followed over from Voat, but a goodly number there know my name, address, phone number, and a whole bunch about me. I don't care. I don't mind. I *chose* to make that information available. That's very, very different than some company mining it, selling it, smashing the bits together and seeing connections of friends, family, and interests. The two are entirely different, at least in my head. More importantly, they're things I *choose* to do. I elect who I trust with that information. Am I the only one who sees the difference between them? Hell, I've met two goats in real life, will be meeting a third soon, and speak to another one on the phone sometimes - and text two more. But, I'm not going to name names and tell you who they are - they can reveal that themselves and only do so if they feel like it. This, this is like that whole sense of control has been ripped away from these users. They've completely lost their fucking minds! They've taken their (very) private data, smashed it together to make sense out of it, and then drawn connections between them, their interests, their dislikes, their views, and fucking monetized it. Fuck, no... They've done worse than just monetized it. They've fucking used that data AGAINST the users in order to manipulate them. Be it for ads to buy something or to control the way they think and, perhaps, the way they vote. That's fucking batshit insane! That's just absurd. Dystopian science fiction authors didn't even dream of this. Holy balls, the world has lost its fucking mind. Seriously... Who the fuck thought this was okay? Who said, "Yeah, that's a brilliant idea. Fuck 'em if we get caught?"