Facebook: Is it the Best Invention Ever, or is it a Menace to Society?

Facebook. There's no need to say more words for most people with a computer to know what we are talking about. It's a fascinating tool to connect and re-connect with people; within an environment and era that everyday keeps us more tied to our computer than actually meeting face-to-face. Yet, everyday more people express they believe that it is a threaten to our privacy and an opportunity for identity theft, industrial or governmental espionage and other ways of taking advantage of us users. So, who is right?

What is out of discussion is that Facebook is a sociological phenomenon. Everyday, millions of users connect in many ways and with different purposes to this website.

It's a boom that has been happening gradually all around the world. A couple of years ago it boomed in the U.S., for example, and yet only six months or so has boomed in some countries of South America. And it keeps growing.

There are people logging in to look for old school buddies, of whom they have not heard of for years. And they are thrilled when they find them, knowing the odds of getting in touch again the old fashioned way (that is, not using Facebook) would have been almost none.

Other people just use it to keep in contact with friends and family abroad. In the globalized world we live nowadays, it's notoriously how many people would move out of their country following employment opportunities, or just personal interest. And an opportunity as this, to maintain contact, can't be overlooked.

There are even some people that enlist in Facebook just because their friends or family, which live nearby, are just communicating mainly through it. Events are organized and scheduled through Facebook, and if you are not a user, you are left out.

Be it for one reason or the other, people will connect, and Facebook will grow. And as it happens in every aspect of social life, when something is popular, it will have fans and detractors.

Detractors would say you are risking too much when entering any kind of personal data on any website, especially one that openly shares it. The most skeptics would go as far as saying there is no way the Company would not use your data for some obscure purpose (being the less harmful, marketing).

Fans would say it is just nonsense, and some would blindly put incredible amount of private information as cell phone numbers and home addresses, ignoring electronic fraud.

But as always in life, extremism is some bad sin. As the popular saying dictates, nothing is true or false, it just depends on the way you look at it.

Facebook, or any other internet social network, is not good or bad. It's just a tool that is there for you to use, in the way you consider it properly.

It would be silly to ignore that in the times we are living, connecting through a computer, no matter the distance between people, is a great advance. It has changed how people live and make their decisions. You can accept a job on a foreign country not fearing you will loose contact with your roots, You can read your country's newspapers while abroad, listen to it's radio stations, watch it's TV channels, etc. All of it through the internet.

We also need to realize that in the 21^st century, people have not only an actual persona, but also a virtual one. And so, the definition of privacy itself has evolved radically.

The wise thing to do seems to be to take advantage of technology and potentiate our lives, while being aware of the threats of our surroundings (be them virtual ones in this case).

As with any change, society will eventually evolve and learn from its own experience. The important thing for us is learn to adapt. In a growing world, it's our only choice.