Facebook convenes privacy 'crisis' meeting Facebook has called a general meeting on privacy amid widespread user discontent over a succession of privacy-eroding changes by the social network. The "all hands meeting" of Facebook staffers is due to take place at 4pm PDT on Thursday. It follows a critically panned attempt by Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president for …
Movie Reference: "That's a 300 Dollar hat, bitch"
Just CANCEL. It's just another ADVERTISING medium now anyway. And, with their apps, outside sites can use your FB accounts to farm your info, but they're not worried about that right now. Because Mafia Wars is the most important thing. One could say a "hit" is warranted....I kid, of course.
I hardly get on that much anymore anyway.
The last thing I want to worry about is my info all over a site I don't use.
Also, for people to be that arrogant to think that all their friends since birth need to know bugger all about what they're doing every minute of the day is a level of self-centered arrogance this world has never seen before.
Anyone really believe that they're going to fix the mess they've made and suddenly allow you to own your own info?
Quit while you're ahead people. There are other sites and more on the way -- some might even learn from facebook's mistakes and actually offer an honest service (a guy can dream).
Even stranger than what FB can get away with privacy wise is why on earth you get people filling out reams of personal info in the first place. If memory serves, when I signed up in order to reserve a vanity url (or whatever you call them) as soon as I logged in I had a prompt asking me to fill out more personal information than you'd probably agree to giving to your employer - pages of names, birthdates, emails, addresses, phone #s, urls, friends, location, and way more.
When Twitter asks for effectively 4 things - a unique username, your name, a location, and your email - I struggle to see why anyone would use FB. Yes, it provides image uploading etc - more for revealing everything about you - but at least Twitter has third-party apps for the like and to me is actually useful in finding various web dev resources and news.
Facebook isn't free, stupid. They sell your info to third parties (a process, btw, that you will never, ever, have any say in) That's the price you pay for this "free" service. Is it a price worth paying?
Well I guess that depends on how much you value your privacy, and ultimately, on how much you value yourself as a human being. If the answer to that question is "not at all" then having an excruciatingly detailed log of your life indiscriminately sold to ad-men, the government and any other antisocial prick with money in return for a go on Farmville must be an excellent deal.
Seeing what a complete pigs ear the Developer API's are : which includes passing session tokens in plain text on URLs, and being able to pick up session cookies belonging to other users, and the bugs and security holes that people have found which remain unfixed after months, I don't really hold out any hope for them fixing it.
Remember the people who got in trouble for posting about pulling a sickie?
Well under the new Graph API you can search for it:
https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=sickie&type=post&access_token=2227470867|2.ERZNAaqqLJbm_plRF0_SGA__.3600.1273759200-892645194|Cz5pqT5MzM-mMhqUJ6VbI1udE68.
Now that is WRONG!
http://www.rocket.ly/home/2010/4/26/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook.html
Wont make a difference, as P.T. Barnum was alleged to have said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
And then there's the venerable, " A fool and his money is soon parted".
Just goes to show that people have been free to be stupid and unsafe long before the internet was born and the stupid and arrogant pretty much get what they deserve.
Don't put anything on Facebook that you would screw you up if it were made public. The same goes for any website, or indeed any device that is connected to the internet. It may be nominally secure, but ther is no way of knowing if or when a security flaw will be found that exposes your information to anyone.
If I recall correctly, FB will hang on to your deleted data in much the same way as Google, but for much longer. Once it's out it's out, you cannot "undo" this.
Your only option is never to provide anything you might want to delete later, and that's where your problem starts: what looks like a good, useful idea now may not work with what you do later.
Ergo a default stance of just being very, very careful.. If your social life depends on FB you may want to find a life first..
I deactivated my Facebook account several weeks prior to the new privacy changes being introduced. My hope is that by the time I get arround to reactivating it Facebook will have suitable privacy controls in place. There's no chance I'm reactivating it until Facebook improves its attitude towards privacy. I do miss Facebook but I read the warning signs and decided that my privacy is more important than being able to keep in touch with friends. After all, I've still got email and the telephone to keep in contact with those friends who live a bit too far away for a day trip :)
Even the most security conscious people can't turn off what I consider is the worst of their "features".
If you are logged into Facebook, and visit certain websites (CNN for one), those sites can pull your name and location information without your knowledge or consent.
CNN is already using this on some of their pages, and you may not have noticed. Some of their pages allow you to post comments. If you're logged into Facebook, your name will already appear in the comments section, ready for you to post a comment. This is done through some fancy Javascript that talks to one of the Facebook authentication servers, using credentials from your Facebook cookies fro your other open window *.
Facebook's privacy settings do not allow you to disable this "feature". So, you just need to visit a site and wham, they just got your name and location.
Someone should sue Facebook for millions for this one.
* Some versions of IE on Windows seem to successfully block this.
You can use Firefox's Adblock Plus add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865) to prevent any other Web site from talking to Facebook when you visit that site. Just install Adblock Plus and then add the following filters:
||facebook.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||facebook.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
The above filters tell Firefox never to allow any site other than Facebook's four sites (facebook.com, facebook.net, fbcdn.com, and fbcdn.net) to access Facebook. Thus, Facebook continues to work perfectly, but other sites don't get to talk to Facebook at all.
Sorry, Facebook has seriously fucked shit up. When I signed on you could hide information you held as critical, like oh, your date of birth. I tried to update this for my mother the other day, and guess what? Yeah, that's right, you can't anymore. I'm not sure what the hell kind of crap they are pulling with websites. My mother has barely logged onto the site a few times and it wants to link her up to half a dozen other sites. No option to decline.
I'm with Andre on this one. Even though I know the only ones who will really get anything is the lawyers, if someone wants to launch a class action suite against them for not protecting Personally Identifiable Information, I'm all in.
Nope - that won't turn it off. If you're very clever, and dig deep enough, you will find Facebook's statement that you can't turn that bit off. They tell you quite clearly that sites can get your name and location, because it is "public information".
Read their statement like you were a lawyer:
""When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone (Edit Profile Privacy) as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. The application will request your permission to access any additional information it needs."
There is one way to kill it, and that's to set up a dummy entry in your hosts file for the site they use for this (connect.facebook.net). This does break some Facebook functionality though.
Check it out for yoruself. Open Facebook in one window and log in. Browse around CNN's site in another winodw until you find a page that supports Facebook comments and see your name there. If you have some tool that shows you all the connections behind the scenes (like Safari on Mac's Activity window) you'll see the connection (and their JS file) even on CNN's main page. That means CNN knows your name even before you reach a comments page.
Worse yet, if you told Facebook to keep you logged in, this can happen when you don't have Facebook actually open, since it uses your Facebook cookies.
You can of course disable Javascript too. Or delete your Facebook account.
I went to the EFF site and checked how to turn off the auto-personalization. Turns out it wasn't enabled. Just like the last big FB privacy scare. Then again maybe it's because I never had just the default settings on. I always restricted what was available to people, including friends.
Hmm Faceplant A**eparty etc... the clue here is to get a REAL life.
I Never got the hype about this social networking fail anyhow, I believe my friends are important enough for me to make the (real) time to interact with them directly in person or by phone etc, that is a real time 2 way exchange, but then these are "real" friends rather than inherited from others or semi strangers that want to tag themselves onto your life.
The more that the sheeple feed this sort of thing (cos its cool innit?) the more powerful it will get. I didnt register/wont register and they wont get the chance to invade my privacy - Simples!
When I first looked at FB (just to see what the fuss was about) I didn't like what I saw on the privacy side, so didn't join.
Later I needed to be on in order toaccess some information that was on there, so i did what I always do in such cases;
False Name
Address - Head Office of the firm involved
and their phone No.
Date of birth - 1 Jan 1900
Sex - flip a coin, or in the odd case where it is a text field, YES.
and so on
and so on.
Surely everybody does this?
Everywhere?
But it is true that I drink bheer.
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