I recently reconnected with Dan McQuillan, the web manager for Amnesty International. We were both on a panel on human rights at the NetSquared conference last year. Anyway, Dan has a blog called, internetartizans that has a whole bunch of cool stuff human rights and internet technology. It’s definitely worth checking out.
This post is particularly interesting since he covers a few ways in which people at existing social networking sites like MySpace, and Facebook are protecting themselves from search engine tracking, “adveillance” to use his term.
Track me not is a Firefox extension that obfuscates your search queries to make it harder for Google or Yahoo to profile you, but I’m totally gonna use Fake Your Space (it appears to be down), which “allows unpopular people on MySpace, Facebook and Consumating to buy hot friends. For just $.99 per month, you can buy a good-looking friend who will leave 2 comments on your profile every week”.
As someone with no friends on any of the aforementioned sites, $.99 a month sounds very reasonable for even average looking friends.