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This appetite for personal data reflects a fundamental truth about Facebook and, by extension, the Internet economy as a whole: Facebook provides a free service that users pay for, in effect, by providing details about their lives, friendships, interests and activities. Facebook, in turn, uses that trove of information to attract advertisers, app makers and other business opportunities.
~ Selling You on Facebook - WSJ.com -
The Internet isn’t some obscure thing that only a few thousand people use for a couple hours a day at the most. This is the Internet that everyone connects to, and if you sent some embarrassing pics of yourself to public, it’s your own damn fault. (…) Deleting out of anger after the fact won’t get rid of anything. There is archiving of almost everything that is online. Almost none of it goes away after archival. The best thing you could do is to delete and hope that after a year or two, it’ll be forgotten. There might be an archive of that pic you posted of yourself dry humping someone other than your spouse, but who’d check all the archives, right?
~ We’re All Monitored, All the Time | Digital | SPLICETODAY.com -
The contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor was given to the U.S. government after they requested it using a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, according to the Wall Street Journal. The law allows the government to demand information from ISPs not only without a warrant, but without ever notifying the user.
~ Google Hands Wikileaks Volunteer’s Gmail Data to U.S. Government -
“If you take a quick look through the document (PDF), you can see just how much data Facebook stores about you and your activities. As well as the information you’d expect (name, address, date of birth, friends), there’s also unexpected data such as messages you have deleted, logging which events you decided not to attend as well as those you did, the last location you accessed Facebook from, a list of every single machine you ever logged into Facebook from, who has poked you, and there’s even fields for political and religious views even though they were empty.”
(via Facebook stores up to 800 pages of personal data per user account | Geek.com)
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~ Facebook Users Beware: Facebook’s New Feature Could Embarrass YouPeople need to be aware of what they’re signing up for when they add apps to the Timeline. Even my tech-savvy friends seem to set up these auto-share apps, completely forget about them, and return to doing things they wouldn’t necessarily want to share with all their friends.
Should you worry about Facebook’s new Gestures functionality? No, but even the most technical among us should be aware that sharing everything is not always wise, and that selecting the right privacy settings can protect you against any mistakes.
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There are plenty of privacy measures in place to protect you, but as a user perhaps a more relevant question is: do I want a single corporation to know so much about me? Or, as John Battelle put it, do I want the “story of my life” under the control of Facebook?
~ The New Facebook: 3 Major Implications -
Facebook is retro because, like AOL, it’s retro by its nature. It’s a closed system. Some people like a closed comfy system and others don’t. I, for one, don’t. If I want a personal webpage with all sorts of information about myself, I’ll go to Wordpress.com and make one. By doing this, I don’t turn over any data, control, or information to an onerous third party to sell, use, or exploit. I can close down the site when I want. I can say what I want. I can pretty much do whatever.
~ Why I Don’t Use Facebook | John C. Dvorak | PCMag.com -
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~ Report: Facebook caught sharing secret data with advertisersA report in the Wall Street Journal indicates that the Facebook, along with MySpace, Digg, and a handful of other social-networking sites, have been sharing users’ personal data with advertisers without users’ knowledge or consent.
The data shared includes names, user IDs, and other information sufficient to enable ad companies such as the Google-owned DoubleClick to identify distinct user profiles. Some of the sites in question, including MySpace and Facebook, stopped sharing the data after the Journal asked them about it. The surreptitious data sharing was first noticed (PDF) by researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs in August 2009, who brought it up with the sites in question. It wasn’t until WSJ contacted them that changes were made.
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Openbook draws attention to the information Facebook makes public about its users via its search API. Facebook exposed this service on April 21st, 2010. Our goal is to get Facebook to restore the privacy of this information, so that this website and others like it no longer work.
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~ Has Facebook’s Evil Genius Gone Too Far? | Techi.comThis system is potentially dangerous, and while I freely share my own information around the Web, there is a different expectation with Facebook than, say, Twitter. There are things on Facebook that I would like to keep private, but lately it feels like Facebook is doing everything it can to convince me and its users to open up and share our information with the world.
It’s making many users uneasy about Facebook. And it has gotten to the point where some well-known throughout the tech and social media industries have decided to abandon Facebook altogether.
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~ Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter | Wired.comFacebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned.
In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users.
