Facebook: Your privacy is there product. Facebook Home isn't where your privacy is | Security & Privacy. When Mark Zuckerberg and friends debuted Facebook Home yesterday, they downplayed the ever-growing importance your data has for the company. While the Facebook-obsessed may love Home, chances are your privacy won't feel welcome at all. Facebook has earned a reputation for developing new products and features that are respectful of user privacy, and then slowly, sometimes with great subtlety and sometimes with mastodon-like lumbering, walking those policies back to a decidedly less-respectful state. There's little indication that Facebook Home will be any different.
At the Facebook Home question-and-answer session that followed Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg said, "Analytics are made anonymous and used for half a percent of the user base. " He added that that's the same as Google and Apple, which sounds reasonable, right? The catch is that the more you share on Facebook, the more Facebook learns about you, and Facebook Home is designed to make you want to share even more. Facebook privacy violations: blame the settings or the etiquette? One of Facebook’s own former directors encountered the pointy end of the sharp stick that is the social network’s privacy controls, according to BuzzFeed. Randi Zuckerberg is the former marketing director of Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister.
She had a private photo of hers reposted to a Twitter feed by a friend of a friend who did not realize the shared photo was, in fact, not for public consumption. Zuckerberg initially posted the photo to her timeline showing her family’s glowing reaction to Facebook’s new Poke application. The photo was not posted publicly for all to see, but was visible to Callie Schweitzer, director of marketing and special products at Vox Media. Schweitzer was friends with someone tagged in the picture.
Study: Your Facebook “likes” might be overexposing you. In a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers analyzed the “likes” of nearly 60,000 American Facebook users to infer their personality and behavior profiles. After comparing the data to responses given by study participants in a personality test, researchers found that “likes” were a fairly reliable predictor of the users’s sexual orientation, gender, age, ethnicity, IQ, religion, politics and cigarette, drug, or alcohol use.
Now, this might seem pretty obvious. If you “like” the National Rifle Association, odds are good that you’re a gun enthusiast. If you “like” the Salon page, odds are good that you are a super attractive genius with excellent taste in reading material. The findings of the study seems self-evident since users are, after all, building an Internet personality profile by curating their tastes. But not everything you give the tiny “thumbs up” to is quite that obvious, and some “likes” reveal more than others. Netflix Social lets users show exactly how they spend nights on the couch. Netflix has reintroduced social sharing features to its service as of Wednesday, the company announced on its blog. After adding a “friends” feature back in 2005 and then removing it in 2010, Netflix is readjusting to a new video sharing landscape that is no longer in the vise grip of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which prevented services like Netflix from integrating with ones like Facebook due to privacy violations.
The Video Privacy Protection Act long forbade video rental services from disclosing their customers’ rental history without explicit, physically written permission from the customer for every instance a share occurred. An amendment was made to the act in December 2012 that allowed this permission to be given over the Internet and to cover a period of time, up to two years, with as many shares as the provider or customer see fit to make in that time. Now, Netflix users can connect their accounts to Facebook and share their viewings to friends. Congress Says Netflix Can Share What You're Watching.