The computer security organization Sophos recently conducted a poll, and found that 60% out of 1,500 respondents, owing to privacy concerns, were considering deleting their profile. It is not clear if this is indicative of a definite fall from grace for the website, but is at least more fuel for their bad news month.
Tag: Facebook
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.
You’ve got 0 friends
Following May’s post earlier this week, I was more than amused to be pointed towards this South Park episode “You’ve got 0 friends”. Would you believe me if I was to say that I have never watched South Park before? And now I can say that I have watched almost a complete single episode… well nearly to the end before I was pulled away to attend my daughter. However I saw enough to feel the need to share with you.
This episode epitomizes both the cool highs and lows and dilemmas of Facebook. Take a look even if you don’t like South Park, as is the case with myself. Especially all of you with a Facebook profile will find it very funny 🙂
Just to add to all the news about Facebook
As if there is not enough news about the latest facebook changes, I had to write something to contribute to all that noise. This is my $0.02.
For a person who has moved around quite a bit and away from home, facebook is a convenient tool to keep in contact with people who are physically far from where I am. Heck, it made it easier to keep in contact with the friends who live in the same city as I do. My friends though are probably not going to get a whole lot of information about me given my highly paranoid privacy settings. (One may also see this as me being too lazy to fill in all my favourite quotes, movies, music, tv shows, my employer data and where I was educated. So really, there is no data in the first place to be made public.)
When I first read in the WIRED article that what one writes in one’s status update can automatically put one on a certain fan page and viewed by everyone, I got quite upset. But after some digging, I realised that maybe they didn’t get it all right. Status updates are still within one’s privacy control. Unless you allow everyone (and I mean everyone on facebook) to view your status updates, then of course it will appear when anyone (and I mean anyone on facebook) will see your status update when they search for that fan page. It just shows how confusing it can get with every new policy change and takes a while for one, even the tech savvy, to understand the changes. I appreciate facebook’s attempt at making privacy settings more fine-grained but this makes it more complex as well and thus difficult to explain and for people to comprehend.
What I particularly dislike about the policy changes are the default privacy settings and the expanding definition of basic information that is made available to everyone in facebook. It would also help if facebook understood the difference between publishing and making something public within a sphere you created. (See article.) For example, this blog entry is publishing. It differs from having this as a note posted on my facebook page because the privacy setting I would have limited (and controlled) the people who will be able to see post.
Below I highlight two issues that I personally find worrying and perhaps, more difficult to deal with.
(1) I think I have a good grasp on how to control the data that I made public and what is kept to my circle of friends. What is a concern though, is the information that my friends are posting about me on facebook. That is something that I do not control. Everyone perceives privacy differently and mutual agreement / consenus should be required in order for data to be made public. It would be nice to see a function within facebook that requests for permission to post a photo of a friend or even tag a friend. This respects the privacy of all parties involved. And if this is a cumbersome process, perhaps it will make one think twice about what to post online. More are exercising self-censorship as mentioned in this article in the NY Times.
(2) Another concern does not involve so much the social aspect of facebook but applies more to application security. These are the vulnerabilities in web applications that lead to data leakage. Here are some that have been reported in the past by Sophos. The leakage of IP addresses and the security hole in the chat.
So to conclude, nope, I am not going to drop off facebook land any time soon. But I will reconsider if ever become famous. Can’t have any photos of me sent to TMZ. Not that there are any discriminating ones.
Another change of privacy policy by Facebook
From one of Jack’s twitters 🙂
U.S. lawmakers told Facebook on Tuesday they were concerned about changes in its privacy policy that would allow personal information to be viewed by more than friends, and options on other websites that would allow third parties to save information about Facebook users and friends. Read more at the Washington Post.
Power to the people of Skåne!
There is a lot of activity going on in protest in Skåne (Sweden) whereby the Coop have decided to stop selling milk that is produced in Skåne in their stores and instead sell milk from Denmark. As soon as Coop customers heard that this decision was made a pressure group was set up in Facebook to complain on what grounds this decision was made. This is really easy to do in Facebook. This was going on in 2009. Now there are over 12000 members and it has made Swedish news on the TV.
This is one of those great examples where social networking tools empower the people! This forces the giants to listen and not just brush away this one single irritating fly that won’t stop buzzing. Instead they have a hornets nest to manage…
House rules on the privacy settings in Facebook
I came across a good article, a privacy checklist that you can use to have better control over your privacy settings on Facebook following the recent complaints concerning Facebook’s privacy change.
I have a Facebook profile for some time that I have used to understand its impact on how we are communicating, and make my own mind up on all the hype. However, I have become a little tired of it now… so much irrevelant information. Although there are ways to restict this popping up, it seems that it new irrelevant data pops up as it is created. I will deactivate my account, or even better commit Facebook suicide 😉
Facebook – “That social norm is just something that has evolved over time”
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old chief executive and founder of Facebook, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people”. For him, “That social norm is just something that has evolved over time”.
Complete article here (The Guardian): Privacy no longer a social norm, says Facebook founder
Inverse social networking
I read in the Time or the Economist… I need to dig out the reference as I have hard-copy subscriptions… anyhow it was a few months ago of how lawyers are using social networking sites like Facebook in divorce cases, especifically when it comes to custody of children. Claims of a pristine life are not well supported if there are pictures of you partying on Facebook. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that a demand for Facebook suicide is growing.
In fact I find it rather annoying that it is only possible to deactivate your profile. Why not a delete function, what have Facebook got to lose?
Euthanasia on Facebook?
Did you know that it is not possible to delete your Facebook profile, that you can only deactivate it?
Seppukoo.com, created by the Italian group Les Liens Invisibles, launched a campaign in 2009 to convince people that to commit Facebook suicide. Wannabe ex-Facebook members can provide Seppukoo.com with their names and passwords and Seppukoo then not only deactivates their profiles, but also creates a “memorial” page that it sends to users’ former Facebook friends.
Facebook is not happy about this and there looks as there will be some interesting legal wrangles in the air. In the meantime, Facebook appears to be taking matters into its own hands. The Los Angeles Times reports today that Facebook is now blocking the IP address of another company, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, which helps people quit social networking sites by unfriending their contacts. Like Seppukoo.com and Power.com, Suicide Machine asks users for their names and passwords.
This is going to be fun..read more at MediaPost blogs…