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. 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. Australia Facebook ID probe 2009. 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). The results were even worse than in the London experiment of 2007. Be careful when getting into social networking. Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rolling out a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users.
The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We're glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening. Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy "improvements" have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service.
Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky? « The Jason Calacani. Now Is It Facebook’s Microsoft Moment? I came close to killing my Facebook account this week.
As I delved even deeper to the supposed privacy I have or don’t have on the service, I wondered why on earth I even have an account at all. Facebook's Great Betrayal - Facebook - Gawker. SExpand Facebook's privacy pullback isn't just outrageous; it's a landmark turning point for the social network.
Facebook has blundered before, but the latest changes are far more calculated. The company has, in short, turned evil. Its new privacy policy have turned the social network inside out: millions of people have signed up because Facebook offers a sense of safety. For the last five years — as long as you're relatively careful about who you accept as your friends — what you do and say on Facebook for the most part stays on Facebook. The most insidious part of Facebook's scheme to expose user data has been how the company framed them, claiming to want to enhance privacy.
But when the system came out a week later, it actually gave less, not more, control over information. Meanwhile, the social network is pushing users hard to share their personal content with strangers. Ratrace. Facebook: Starting Over « Mediactive Blog. Like many other people, I have a Facebook account. One reason is to keep track of what’s happening in the planet’s largest social network, including what application developers and users are doing there. Another is that some of my friends — actual friends — are using the site.
Facebook helps me stay in touch. But the privacy fiasco of the past few days has left me feeling that I really can’t entirely trust Facebook, even with the limited amount of things I’ve said and done on the site since I got an account several years ago. Maybe I’m over-reacting — and I continue to admire the company’s accomplishments in many other ways — but that’s just the way it is. Why don’t I feel safe and sound in their benevolent hands? I wasn’t very happy with my Facebook situation in any case.