Anil Dash examines Facebook's latest navigational practices, which go beyond making a walled garden of its own content and begin to attack the open Web, including websites that incorporate Facebook's technology. Dash concludes that Facebook now meets the formal definition of a "badware" site — the sites that generate those "Warning! This site may harm your computer" interstitial pages when you visit them — and calls on browser vendors and Google to start displaying these warnings when users visit Facebook.
Now, we've shown that Facebook promotes captive content on its network ahead of content on the web, prohibits users from bringing open content into their network, warns users not to visit web content, and places obstacles in front of visits to web sites even if they've embraced Facebook's technologies and registered in Facebook's centralized database of sites on the web…
I believe [StopBadware's malware definition] description clearly describes Facebook's behavior, and strongly urge Stop Badware partners such as Google (whose Safe Browsing service is also used by Mozilla and Apple), as well as Microsoft's similar SmartScreen filter, to warn web users when visiting Facebook. Given that Facebook is consistently misleading users about the nature of web links that they visit and placing barriers to web sites being able to be visited through ordinary web links on their network, this seems an appropriate and necessary remedy for their behavior.
Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.
(via O'Reilly Radar)
