Facebook Is Auto-Creating Creepy 'Relationship' Pages You Didn't Ask For

At first, Facebook was irrelevant. I didn’t get it. Why did I need Facebook when I could post all the Blingees I wanted on my friends’ MySpace walls? This shit is obviously dumb. But then, somehow, seemingly overnight, Facebook became ubiquitous. Lively. MySpace was static, stagnant garbage. Facebook was fun and interactive! Facebook for all!

Then Facebook got kind of overwhelming and I started getting one million friend requests from fake people and randos and pictures of a shoe and my mom. But I kept my page open, justifying it with some bullshit about “networking” and “developing my personal brand” (HORK). Plus, Facebook is a major conduit for information at this point, and I traffic in information. For my job. Plus, I don’t want to be some Mennonite nerd who’s afraid of the future!!! And my mom doesn’t know how to use Twitter—so how will I let my mom know about the awesome tuna casserole I just made if I don’t put a pic of it on Facebook with the caption “satisfied-sunglasses-face”!?!?

B-)

Awwwwwww, yeah.

But seriously, as its necessity wanes and its rigidity and intrusiveness increase, Facebook is starting to creep me the fuck out. Like, get OFF me, you guys. Like this, for example, via the Telegraph:

Please take note Facebook executives: I enjoy being able to share the information I wish and curate in the way I want. I have no desire for your technology teams to help me organise my photos – nor do I wish to have a shared ‘couples’ Facebook profile with my other half on which you automatically curate our relationship.

Over the weekend I discovered I had just that – but only through a friend telling me. I didn’t receive a notification from Facebook informing me that their squat team in Palo Alto, California, had taken the liberty of creating me a joint digital profile with my husband.

…In a further weird move Facebook has also decided to revamp its ‘friendship pages’ allowing you a similarly creepy joint page with your mates.

Gross.

Of course I immediately looked to see if I have a “couples page” too (you just go to www.facebook.com/us, if your keyboard isn’t shorted out from all the barf)—and, of course, I do. To be honest, it’s fairly innocuous.

It’s just content aggregation—a list of all of our interactions on each other’s Facebook walls (mostly me writing “poop” on his wall and then liking my own comment), a collection of all of the pictures where we’re both tagged, and a round-up of our friends in common and “Likes” in common. In practice, it’s not too creepy, or even particularly gushy and romantic, and, as far as I can tell, I can’t go in and customize anything, even if I were so inclined. And I have no idea how anyone outside our relationship would even be able to find it and look at it if they wanted to. It’s likely that nobody has looked at my couples page except for the robot that built it. So, really, it’s kind of a non-event.

However. That doesn’t mean that Facebook’s growing, um, go-getter-ishness, doesn’t make me feel totally fucking claustrophobic. It’s incredibly creepy to think of a computer program having its long digi-fingers in my relationship—defining my relationship based on a sliver of incidental online interactions. I do not want my Facebook account (or any of my electronics, really) to be a self-motivated initiative-taker. That is how we end up with ROBOT HEGEMONY (OBV). I want my Facebook account to be my groveling, obsequious slave. I would like to be in charge of what it does, who it talks to, what time it comes home at night, and how it shares my personal information with the world. It is MINE, after all.

Except, of course, it isn’t mine. Obviously, the possibility of that paradigm existing (I’m in control of my own image! The internet works for ME!) anywhere in the onlines is a fantasy that all of us modern, medium-competent computer users are going to have to come to terms with. Facebook is a company and it tells me what I can do with it; not the other way around.

So, I don’t know, maybe it’s time for me to break up with that shit and delete my account forever. Consider me creeped, F-book.