Does Facebook spy on us?

Last week, I, Dipankan, observed a lot of strange Facebook activity. What is so strange? Dead people liking stuffs. What! Yes, it's true. One of my old friends of Facebook, who passed away a year ago, apparently "liked" a page about Opera Music. If the person is dead, who'll be operating his Facebook account? You guess it's no one. Facebook is. This is the reality.

What's the actual mystery behind all this? Full disclosure: I’m an active Facebook user, and I really enjoy it. I use Facebook to stay in touch with my friends and family who are scattered across the country and world. I also use Facebook to promote this blog I publish, Indian Institute of Students. The first sign I saw that something was not quite right was that after I’d spent a lot of time getting people to “like” the IIS India page, fewer and fewer people were seeing my posts. This does worry me. Also, I noticed another scam. What I liked earlier continued to show up on my friend's news feeds. That means, Facebook is impersonating us and posting on our behalf which is invisible to us but visible to others! I don't see this anywhere in the Facebook privacy policy- it isn't even there. Possibly it's one of their tricks to bring page "likes" to pages that     create advertisements in Facebook, even though the social networking giant says that they try to make people really like the product instead of just banging the like button. Can Facebook be trusted?

It's not any easy matter. All Facebook users should be conscious of what they like- because it may pop up on one of their friend's news feed maybe a year or two later. I'd like to provide a real-life example. Suppose a employee of Company A likes a page on Facebook about "Company A cheats people" and consider the employee has the boss of Company A on his friend's list, and the page like shows up again after few months in the News feed of the company's boss, chances are that the employee might get sued or fired. It isn't that I am blaming the boss; or the employee, who inadvertently liked the page, but the main culprit is Facebook, who, without asking for permission, constantly posts on our behalf. Millions of people also quit Facebook for this reason.

So the next time you like some pages and stuff such that, be aware of what you like. It may come back to bite you in a completely indirect way years later after you forget you've even liked the page.