Okay, while there’s much to criticize Mark Zuckerberg for, the point of all this eludes me: Facebook isn’t putting Turd under surveillance — he’s posting these photos in a public forum himself.
And really, the first thing they teach in Cheating 101 is “Don’t post photos of yourself with your bit on the side.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
Just because “Don’t post photos of yourself with your bit on the side,” is utterly obvious doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen all the time. “Don’t post photos of yourself with easily identified stolen property,” should be equally obvious, but there seems to be a story every week or two of stupid thieves getting caught because they did exactly that (see panel 6 here).
People still act as if posting something on Facebook is just sending it to your “friends” while in fact they should act as if it was going to be send to the entire world.
It’s not clear that the guy in Rat’s story took those pictures himself.
In this case, I took “Zuckerberg” to be the personification of Facebook, rather than the person, himself.
Well, unless one reads the fine print on every update, one may not realise if one has consented to all ones photos getting uploaded to FB automatically and so on and so forth. For ones own convenience, of course.
DemetriosX, I’ve WRITTEN a lot of those articles.
But that’s just my point: the strip seems to blame Facebook’s intrusiveness — and of course they DO mine and sell information about us — but in this particular case the rests entirely on Turd and over-sharers.
He and Ashley took the selfie in Panel 6, so there’s no reason to believe one or the other of them didn’t take and post the others.
If not, the comic doesn’t make any sense at all.
From a CIDU perspective, this strip would have been just a little more amusing if Pastis had spelled the name as “Ashlee“.
Who took the pic at the Beck concert on June 3rd? Neither of our two heroes/villains seems to be doing so. Perhaps that was Stadium Cam.
@Bill: I figured you probably had. And yeah the blame goes to Ashley and the Turd (which sounds a bit like an 80s detective show), but FB allows the police to do some pretty simple one-stop shopping.
This is one of Rat’s children’s books, which always teach a bad lesson. The turd is in fact a two-timer and likely car thief, but Rat abruptly shifts gears and decides the villain is Zuckerberg for making the evidence readily available.
Perhaps related is the plight of politicians, who can no longer pander with quite the same impunity. The promises and laugh lines at the expense of people not at a particular meeting will get back to them.
Notice that Rat doesn’t feel obligated to make sense. In his drawing Ashley is taking a selfie in the stolen car, but somehow the picture is actually from a POV outside the car and shows Ashley’s cell phone.
Why, yes, I do own nitpicking.com. How did you know? (New post today!)
“People still act as if posting something on Facebook is just sending it to your “friends” while in fact they should act as if it was going to be send to the entire world.”
On the other hand, if you WANT to send it to the entire world, Facebook won’t, unless you give it a lot of money.
Well, given that Facebook is a US company, even if they have distributed data centres, you can be pretty sure that the NSA/FBI/CIA will have access to it all anyway.
I loved it!
@ carlfink, Poking around your nitpick.com, I found your review of The Interior Life. Can’t wait to read it . And it’s free, too!
Being who I am, @Chak, I must nitpick your compliment. My site is nitpicking.com.
If you do like The Interior Life, supporting Dorothy would be a good thing to do. I like supporting creators.
“I found your review of The Interior Life. Can’t wait to read it . ”
Yay Dorothy.
nitpick.com is still available, tho, if anyone cares . . .
AND I think NITPICKING would be a great category for CIDU, long as it was restricted to comics . . . or would that conflict with cidu . . .
@carlfink,
I would apologize for getting the name wrong, but it allowed you to advertise your blog yet again.
Happy to be of service.