Remember the Fifth Of November

How many friends of yours are friends on Facebook? How many people have you met through Facebook? How many of them would you like to stay in touch with if Facebook suddenly disappeared tomorrow? Well, you'd better start saving their e-mail addresses, because if a hackers' group has its way, Facebook will be completely obliterated as of this November 5.

As every Anglophile knows, November 5 is Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the day that terrorist Guy Fawkes's plot to blow up the Parliament building in London - while King James I was in attendance - was discovered in 1605, averting a major catastrophe. It;s celebrated by burning Guy Fawkes in effigy and reminding the English of how lucky they were. (If the al-Qaeda plot against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been discovered, say, a week earlier, September 4 might have been similarly celebrated today in America.) But the holiday has an anti-Catholic tinge to it, as Fawkes, a Catholic, was, along with his co-conspirators, reacting to a slew of anti-Catholic laws  passed by the Protestant elite. Fawkes has nonetheless become an antihero to anarchists and anti-government protesters.

So what does this have to do with Facebook? A group of hackers calling themselves Anonymous insist that Facebook has been selling private information government agencies all over the world and has been giving clandestine access to information security firms to allow these institutions to spy on people. Insisting that everything you place on Facebook stays there, insisting that your information stays on Facebook if you delete it from your profile or even delete your account, and insisting also that nothing yo say or do on Facebook is really private no matter how you set your privacy controls, the hackers at Anonymous insist that they're doing us a favor by destroying Facebook and forcing Mark Zuckerberg into early retirement.

Okay, if you're going to obliterate a social networking site and you pick a date to it, it's probably a good idea to publicize it, as it gives the site's owners time to prepare for an attack. And I'm a little annoyed by the idea that these hackers are doing this for my own good and that I should be thankful for this. In fact, I'm somewhat insulted. I'm pretty careful about what I put on Facebook. I mostly use it to post links to news stories and music videos and to promote my own writing, like this blog. The only personal information of mine that's really on there is my birthday, my hometown, and where I work and went to school, none of which is all that personal anyway. I rarely put personal photos on Facebook; for Pete's sake, most of my wall photos are "Peanuts" comic strips!

Facebook has helped me connect to a lot of people, personally and professionally, that I otherwise wouldn't have connected to. You remember how I befriended eighties supermodel Nancy Donahue? Facebook made that possible. I've also connected to a lot of people in the media, again because of Facebook. It's pretty much become my most important connection to the outside world. I don't need a bunch of self-righteous hackers lecturing me about the lack of privacy on a social networking site when I'm fully capable of deciding what I want to share and what I don't. Maybe they should stop their hacking activities, quit playing with binary code, and do something useful, like design sports video games.

Oh yeah, Anonymous also says Facebook knows more about me than my family. My writers' group knows more about me than my family! I haven't seen any of my extended family in years! If Facebook knows more about me than my cousin Tim or my Uncle Bob, is that really a surprise?

Anyway, I hope Facebook doesn't go down on Guy Fawkes Day, because November 5 happens to be my birthday! If it gets destroyed on November 5, that'll ruin my whole birthday celebration.

I doubt that Anonymous can do any more than cause some trifle that could cause Facebook to shut down for a couple of hours on November 5. However, I'm not taking any chances; I'm saving the e-mail addresses of as many Facebook friends of mine as I can so I can stay in touch with them if Facebook does get destroyed. Unlike with my cousin Tim.

But I'm not sharing any of those e-mail addresses with you. See, I can control my own privacy! :-D

If I couldn't, my Uncle Bob would have found me by now. :-p