God knows I understand that going from one Web site to another with one login and password scheme after the other is a real pain-in-the-rump. After the Gawker password fiasco it’s become clearer than ever that using the same brain-dead simple login and password from one system to another is clearly dumb. But, the idea of using Facebook (Facebook!?) Connect as a universal Internet login and password system makes me want to gag.
You see Facebook is insecure by design and privacy is given only a minimal amount of programming and lip-service. Sure, you can make your Facebook information safe, well safer, anyway, but who has the time to be constantly plugging in Facebook’s privacy holes? Especially since Facebook keeps opening up more and more or your personal information to vendors.
For example, Facebook quietly announced just before the recent three-day weekend that they were opening up a way for third-party Facebook apps developers to get to your snail-mail addresses and phone numbers. Isn’t that nice of them? I know I want the likes of Zynga, makers of FarmVille, and all their partners, to have my home address and phone number.