Well they don't really seem to care about privacy on their site, so why would it be any different when they pass your personalised ad targeting information to everyone else...

They should change their name to Phormbook.

FAiLBOOK, enough already

"It's about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings."

No we just need to get a way of generating a one-time access code that would allow a third party to examine your private information and with a flick of the magic wand we have...

A National Identity Register!

Thus making the governments attempt an example of state-funded competition and hence not allowed. I figure the info on Facebook will be about as reliable as anything in a government database. After all, these are the people who took about ten years to realise subtracting the list of road tax payers from the list of car owners would give them a list of car owners who hadn't paid road tax (along with about 3m non-existent vehicles).

...be able to delete his account?

The government would never be so cynical as to entrust our private data to Facebook. It would be easier to give it Nectar, after all, it knows more about many of us than any government department does.

It's just a website...

What does facebook actually do that requires so many machines??? The 3rd party apps are hosted elsewhere (organised by the developers of the apps) but they obviously need to talk to the facebook api, additionally i appreciate it's a very busy site. But one website = 10,000 servers ($20 million worth)? Doesn't sound like they know how to configure their servers very well (or that their developers know how to code very well).

Ok, I remember seeing a fairly large site for a financial institution attending something like 10 million users. How many servers, you might say? about 40. Ok, add in the mainframe boxen, but still, 40 servers for 10 million users.

According to that measure, Facebook should have 2,500 MILLION users (or 2.5 US Billions), which would make like half the Earth's population. Mind you, I don't think there are that many people hooked up to the Internet, even less likely to be logged on Facebook.

Then again, these "10 thousand servers" might just be 10,000 486 DX2's strapped together! ;)

after being burgled the other week i was discussing the relevance of csi with the forensics bod and she came out with this..

yeah we always look for suspects on facebook.. especiallywith street gangs and stuff.. put it this way.. if we'd have proposed setting up an online system that has your personal details, photograph, interests, qualifications, links to friends all in one place the human rights people would have had kittens.. then face book et al made it fashionable and hey job done.. voluntarily..

name witheld for same reason.. meh.