I would not be so sure

Not having a F***book account may not necessarily be your best lifestyle choice in a world where recruiters try to look you up on F***book before reading your CV or checking your references. Not having a F***book account may not necessarily be your best lifestyle choice if the "backgound checking service" is outsourced to a 3rd party which checks F***book first and if you do not have an account puts you straight into "may have something to hide" category.

Unfortunately, F***book has reached a degree of pervasiveness where you are automatically marked as potential subversive if you refuse to participate.

Signed - known potential subversive refusenik which does not have a F***book account and has no intention to have one. Me coat.

Facebook access to other peoples details not on Facebook

"You only have to have phone/address in a friend's phone who uses the facebook app and your details are uploaded."

@AC: Wow hold the horses there, what Facebook can upload my details simply from someone (who is a member of Facebook) who happens to have my phone number? Please explain what Facebook can upload, as this is news to me? ... what can they upload?

@Anton Ivanov: "Unfortunately, F***book has reached a degree of pervasiveness where you are automatically marked as potential subversive if you refuse to participate."

That can be argued both ways. e.g. its easy to argue the opposite, For example, I don't want a Facebook account and anyway I see it as a waste of time, so if you employ me, I won't be wasting your company time on Facebook. :) ... (I'll be on The Reg instead! ;)

@"vast majority of users simply agreeing with everything they're asked"

I see the Gene Pool shallow end is causing trouble again. But then they are always part of the problem, as they are too ignorant of how so much personal data can be used to manipulate society. But then the manipulative vitriolic control freak wannabee role model sheep herders in society don't want people to say what I just said. So we get this double problem (repeated throughout history) of the sheep and their herders pushing in one way (always ignorantly towards ever increasing Authoritarianism), whilst a minority of society (who keep up with current events) tries to warn of the dangers and has to look on dismayed at the direction the sheep are ignorantly dragging society. :(

@MinionZero

"Wow hold the horses there, what Facebook can upload my details simply from someone (who is a member of Facebook) who happens to have my phone number? Please explain what Facebook can upload, as this is news to me? ... what can they upload?"

Easy. You flesh out your "friends" missing contact info in your Facebook iPhone contacts app. This information, for your convenience and "data-recoverability" is stored on Facebook servers so you have access to your "additional" information whether your on your phone app or the web. Thus, Facebook now has your address and/or phone number, birth date, etc. all of which you falsified or left out intentially in the first place. Quite simple. What's worse, unlike being tagged in a photo, you don't get notified if someone filled out contact info on you.

"@"vast majority of users simply agreeing with everything they're asked"

I see the Gene Pool shallow end is causing trouble again."

While you can sideline this as a "shallow gene pool" issue, it is not. Unfortunately for many, humans are a trusting lot. Just look at punters on Ebay or craigslist. The truth of it is, they're installing the app because they want what the app supposedly does. Does it matter if they have to hit a "Allow" button? Nope. The programs should all be blocked from having access and leave it to the "shallow pool" people to figure out how to enable it post-install. Might work a bit better. Of course, there's always vetting, as mentioned. Finding a balance between helping the most amount of people and inconvenience level is what many companies are struggling with. Just think of UAC on WinVista.

Non-conformism

Anton,

I agree with you - but then again, being a non-conformist has always been uneasy.

Daniel (another potential subversive refusenik)

couldn't have put it better myself

title says it all.

@Adam 54

This is the sheep-shepherd game changer for the Net. The Facebook Green* version of sustainability is to harvest as much wool as possible before harvesting mutton.

Economists make no distinction between mutton and lamb. Government are left wondering why their tax base declines while they serve more citizens. Until they wake up to this fascism-by-proxy there is little that can be done.

* alias Soylent Green

reminds me of the famous words of advice

"If you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you."

Re: Why have a facebook account in the first place?

Simple. I have friends, that's why.

Facebook, evil as it may be, lets me keep in vague touch with them day-to-day and see photos/videos of them and their kids.

Once all your friends are on it, exchanging pictures and chatting away, it's a little churlish to show up late and insist that they all move to something else or you won't play!

Obviously FB know this and capitalise on it, encouraging you to invite friends to the cult at every opportunity. But at the end of the day, you don't HAVE to tell FB where you live... yet.

Typical luddite response

Firstly, no one uses email anymore. That was so 2000's. Email from people I actually know has dropped to practically zero outside of work.

Secondly, how many times in the past has an in-law/parent/grandparent/dozy friend attempted to email you 500MB of holiday snaps or a 10 minute video of little billy?

Thirdly, phones: yeah great. But personally if my mate called me up especially to tell me his son had just said his first word, or had just managed to go potty all by himself, then I'd think he was a bit odd. It's nice to passively hear about these little snippets of other peoples lives, on your own terms, but I wouldn't want a daily phone call from each of my friends!

Face-to-face meetings are also lovely - but most of my friends have very young families and don't even live in the same country as me - so we don't make it down the pub quite as often as we used to. Plus how many people actually take their photo album to the pub?

As for "online security"... really? Use a different password on FB than you use on other sites. Don't enter anything you'd rather people didn't know. What am I giving up exactly?

@GrahamS

"Typical luddite response"

Yes, only luddites don't like Facebook.

Luddites like say... Tim Berners-Lee.

Most of the people that I know that absolutely refuse to have anything to do with Facebook are extremely technical. All of the barely-able-to-turn-their-computer-on-retards I know love it.

Techno Luddites

Yep, perhaps my response should have been "Simple. I have some non-geek friends, that's why."

Yes most of my techy friends dislike Facebook, hate Facebook Connect and regard it all with a healthy suspicion too. But we're still on it and we still use it because our non-technical friends are there.

That's just the way it is.

Facebook is catching Google as the internet homepage - the default way that huge numbers of people interact with the web. It is also threatening to completely squash the floundering OpenID and set itself up as the de-facto standard "Internet ID".

If you don't at least have a dummy FB account to keep track with what they are up to over there then your eye is not on the ball.

If you think there's no point in social networking sites in general, as Mr Gumby appeared to be implying, because hey we have phones, email and photo albums, then you are way out of step with how most normal people are using the web.

re: Typical luddite response

"But personally if my mate called me up especially to tell me his son had just said his first word, or had just managed to go potty all by himself, then I'd think he was a bit odd"

It says something about the world we live in that people feel the need to tweet or facebook about their sons first word "as it happens". Rather than enjoy the moment, quickly grab your smartphone and tweet those words, because yes, the rest of the world obviously also thinks YOUR kid is god's gift to the world.

No one uses email anymore?

You're a fool if you believe that. Facebook messaging is for morons who have fallen into the zuckfu**'s trance.

Half my info there is bogus, that percentage is about to double.

I'm a fool then

I'm in good company though. Other fools are Nielsen Online, ComScore, the Online Publishers Association, and numerous other bodies that have been reporting figures showing a decline in the use of email and the rise of social networking for years now.

"Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time"

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/nielsen-news/social-networking-new-global-footprint/

(March 2009)

"Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.. have had significant impact on the Communications category, which saw a 41 percent decline, due to the fact consumers are using Community sites where they can conduct these same activities more efficiently.”

http://www.online-publishers.org/newsletter.php?newsId=556&newsType=pr

(Sep 2009)

"A recent ComScore Media Metrix report shows teen usage of Web-based e-mail dropped 8 percent last year."

http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/26/technology/thirdscreen0726.biz2/index.htm

(July 2006)

Kind of

Depends on how you deal with your account. I've only added people I really know, and want to keep track of: anyone who I can't be bothered with I accept as a friend and then after a couple of months I remove them.

My account is locked down as tight as possible (excluding bugs of course), so much so, that somebody I sail with said they weren't allowed to add me as a friend even knowing when my email address (could have been a bug)

I have an account because it allows me:

To see what members of my family in Ireland are up to (namely niece & nephew)

To see what friends in Germany are up to.

An easy way to see photos from friends without clogging my Inbox.

What I don't do:

Bad mouth my boss (he's a mate of mine anyway so he knows when I'm pissed off)

Add photos of me pissed, etc.

All it takes is using a bit of common sense, unfortunately that appears to be lacking in today's society. At least you see almost daily reports of somebody seeing the consequences of being an idiot, so maybe things are improving.

You have common sense, but do your friends?

Assuming you do get drunk and silly on occasion or say things you might not want shared with potential employers, I'm not seeing anything preventing your friends from posting embarrassing photos, writing about your political views, etc. And, since you have an account, and they are in your network, it can all be linked back to you. Add to that the fact that google never forgets and you've got some issues.

Yes, I'm paranoid, but maybe not so incredibly so given Eric Schmidt himself has suggested that in the near future children will routinely change their names as they enter the workforce in order to prevent their youthful indiscretions turning up in search results throughout their adult lives.

Same reason Facebook wanted it...

... in case you loose you password? No other reason, of course.

I did too.. but..

then my friends wished me happy b****day on the day quite promptly and f**ked it up...

Having poked around in the development APIs a bit...

Chances are, the website didn't know you were logged into Facebook. The div with that info is bounced off Facebook's servers, and whatever come back is just dropped in. It would take quite a bit of effort to actually get that info back to them.

Then again, it's not impossible... after going through the APIs, I decided never to log in to Facebook in anything but a private session window. Too much chance of the firehose getting pointed at someone I don't know...

@Charles Manning

Without having seen the goods myself, I'll take a guess and say that what the OP saw was an iframe embedded in the third-party site's page. The iframe contains a page from facebook.com which shows the user's info if they are logged-in (and presumably nothing if they aren't), and is requested by the user's web browser, just as though it were being viewed directly (via the address-bar, bookmark or whatnot) - none of that data goes through the third-party's domain, and (assuming the browser protects itself from cross-site scripting, which most do now I believe) the third party can't read it just because it's nested inside their page.

It's not unlike those forum signature images that did the rounds a few years back, where the image was generated by a third-party server (in the FB role in this instance) and contained your IP address, ISP name and OS. The forum poster using the sig didn't know these details (the forum site did, but not thanks to the sig - your browser told both parties) but if you didn't know what was going on it was a bit freaky, which was the point.