Australia Facebook ID probe 2009 | Paul Ducklin's blog. Just over two years ago, Sophos UK conducted a Facebook ID Probe to see how willingly social networkers give out their personal data. 43% of those in the probe accepted an invitation to be friends with Freddi Staur – allegedly a 20-something from London, but in reality a green plastic frog. That was in 2007, and in England. What about 2009, in Australia? With an additional two years' worth of well-publicised warnings from security companies, the media, the cops and from Facebook itself, and with Aussies generally backing themselves to be better at almost everything than the English, surely things would show an improvement?
We decided to find out. This time we created two female Australian Facebook users, Daisy Feletin (21, single) and Dinette Stonily (56, married). Each sent a friend request to 100 randomly-selected contacts in their age group, and waited two weeks to see who would respond. The results were even worse than in the London experiment of 2007. Don't blindly accept friends. Facebook Will Be Google-able (If Your Profile is Set to Public) At Google's event today, the company announced not just a number of fantastic new features, including real-time search, but a new partnership as well: real-time search of public Facebook status updates. A Google/Twitter partnership was announced months ago but we assumed that Facebook wouldn't allow Google to index many details of its site because the two are fast becoming big rivals.
Thus today's announcement is a very big surprise. The integration of Facebook updates into Google search isn't live yet; Google just said "soon" at its event today. The company also declined to comment on whether they were paying for access to this information. SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan pointed out at the Google event today that there was some real irony in the fact that these real-time sources may be receiving millions from the search engines, while newspapers have demanded payment from Google for inclusion in search, but have been rebuffed. Want your Facebook updates to stay out of Google? Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy. We reported yesterday that Facebook is aiming to get people to be more public on the site and that anyone who hasn't changed their privacy settings will now see it "recommended" that their status updates, photos etc. be exposed to the whole web. I had a unique opportunity to speak to Barry Schnitt, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook and quite a frank guy, at length this afternoon about Facebook's privacy policy changes.
Schnitt said "your understanding is basically correct," but disagreed with the negative light I saw the change in. Becoming less private and more public is "a change just like it was a change in 2006 when Facebook became more than just people from colleges," Schnitt told us. "Facebook is changing," he said, "and so is the world changing and we are going to innovate to meet user requests. " Do you buy that? The State of the Transition See also: Zuckerberg Changes His Own Privacy Settings Why The Change? Why are things changing at Facebook? Facebook's Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users.
Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. This represents just the latest instance of Facebook violating the contract it holds with its users. This is no small matter, either. Lots of people will have very real and valid objections to this arbitrary change to what's public and what's private on Facebook. This guest post was written by Kaliya Hamlin, also known as Identity Woman, who has been working on cultivating open standards for user-centric identity since 2004. Personally, very early on I made my friends list explicitly not viewable. Pitfalls of Being Public Why do friends matter? The Boston Globe wrote about this MIT project named "Gaydar": The pages you follow are now public information, too. Different Sites Have Different Contracts With Users Isn't this information all public anyways?
Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky? « The Jason Calacani.