The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Adding more fuel to the fire that is feeding facebook’s fall from grace, here is a graphic that demonstrates the evolution of facebook’s privacy settings over time.

The Guardian’s Andrew Brown, who provided the link had this to say:

    “Ten years ago, when the British government proposed to make traffic data available to a wide variety of agencies under the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act, there was an outcry from civil libertarians. Their point was that you hardly need to know what people are saying to each other if you know who they are talking to. And now Facebook knows and makes this information freely available to almost anyone.

    This may seem like a bad way to treat customers, but the whole point about Facebook is that users aren’t customers. Anyone who supposes that Facebook’s users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren’t customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not.”

As one of the comments read:

    This is a book that nobody should take at face value.

New laws on viewing of child pornography in Sweden

Just to continue the thread on child pornography in Sweden. I came across this article that states that they are also looking to make viewing child pornography a crime soon. Reference of article dated November 2009, so we can expect this to happen in 2010. Sweden’s neighbours Denmark and Norway already have such legislation in place. This new law would make viewing child pornography on the Internet a crime, the offender does not even need to download the images.

Possession of child pornography still legal in Japan :-(

Sweden was quite slow in making the possession of child pornography illegal, I think it was not until 1971, hence I was amazed to find out today that in Japan it is still NOT illegal. To go further the government is actually blocking efforts to make it illegal! They say that to make it illegal conflicts with the ‘freedom of expression’!

What about the children’s right for ‘freedom of expression’. The Japanese National Police Agency said it received 4,486 complaints from the public of child pornography on the internet in 2009 and a record 650 people were charged with offences related to child pornography. Campaigners believe that represents the tip of the iceberg.

I agree with the closing statement of Julian Ryall in Tokyo writing for the Telegraph.co.uk “The only people who will be pleased at the failure to pass this legislation are paedophiles.” Read more here.