Facebook is soo fun, right? A place to reunite with old friends, make new ones, a veritable virtual playground just waiting for you to enjoy it — and share your information with the world, for good or for bad, with or without your knowledge. CBS News takes a look at five common dangers Facebook users are at risk from. [More]
privacy
Al Franken Teaches You About Critical Facebook Privacy Settings
By 5.7.10
Al Franken, hater of Facebook’s cavalier approach to privacy, has posted instructions for how to keep Facebook from disclosing your personal information to their “partners.” Guess what? It’s kinda hard! No, really, there’s more to it than you might expect. [More]
Just For The Record, Your Friend Wasn't Mugged In London
By 5.6.10
You get a desperate email from a friend or acquaintance. It’s urgent. They say they were overseas and got mugged, getting robbed of their cellphone and all their cash and credit cards. Now they’re stranded and need your help. Could you please wire over $900 immediately? [More]
Thanks For Letting The World Know I Bought Sex Toys, Adam & Eve
By 5.6.10
G. writes that she placed an order from Adam & Eve, a venerable seller of adult merchandise. Discretion was crucial, since G. has packages sent to her at work instead of her home mailbox. Fortunately, this company ships packages in unmarked boxes. They do not, however, practice the same discretion with their promotional mailings, which caught G. by surprise. [More]
Top 10 Reasons To Quit Facebook
By 5.4.10
F**** Facebook! More and more, fed up with ever-disintegrating privacy policies, are saying just that, even going so far as to kill their Facebook accounts. Gizmodo has “Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook,” among them, one-sided terms of service, a “war on privacy,” the sharing of private data with applications, but perhaps best of fall, “Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted”: [More]
Two Facebook Apps To Help You Fight Back Against Facebook
By 5.4.10
If you’re unhappy with the latest Facebook privacy settings but don’t want to kill your account completely, ReadWriteWeb has highlighted two services–both Facebook apps–that might give you back some control. They’re not perfect solutions, though. The Green Safe app scrapes all your data into a stand-alone tab that only your friends can access, but it also means a third-party developer will replace Facebook as your data holder (the app will use your data to serve ads as well). The Give Me My Data app lets you export all of your Facebook content so that you don’t lose anything if you disconnect your profile from Facebook’s pages. [More]
Facebook's Privacy Settings Are Actually "Evil Interfaces"
By 5.4.10
Facebook is in a quandary: they want to sell their users’ data for cash, but they don’t want to look like doucheshnozzles. What’s a social network to do? Design a byzantine apparatus for opting out of the privacy-invasions that confuses and discourages the user from using it effectively, while still appearing to be user-friendly and functional. That way they can have their cake and eat it and sell it too. In other words, it’s an “evil interface,” and Facebook’s privacy settings are full of them, argues the Electronic Frontier Foundation: [More]
Bars In Utah Busted For Not Scanning IDs As Required By Law
By 5.3.10
Here’s an interesting law that has some privacy implications. In Utah, bars are required to scan the IDs of anyone “who looks 35 years old or younger”, and the penalty for failing to electronically verify licenses is “akin to serving alcohol to a minor,” says the Salt Lake City Tribune. [More]
Full-Body Scanners Don't Work, Israeli Security Expert Says
By 4.30.10
The biggest reason not to implement full-body scanners in airports isn’t because it’s weird for the government to have a picture of you naked, it’s because they don’t work, says an Israeli airport security expert. [More]
Franken and Schumer To CEO: We Hate Facebook's Privacy Changes
By 4.27.10
Recent and proposed changes to Facebook’s information sharing policies have Senators Franken (D-MN) and Schumer (D-NY) a little irritated. They’ve penned a letter, along with Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Mark Begich (D-AK), asking Facebook to reconsider their new opt-out procedure, and to take further steps to keep user’s personal details, such as their interests and friend lists, private unless they chose to share them. [More]
Senator Asks FTC To Provide Privacy Guidelines For Facebook, Other Social Networks
By 4.26.10
Senator Charles Schumer is upset on your behalf over Facebook’s latest loosening of its privacy policies, and yesterday he called for the FTC to step in and provide some guidance, offering to introduce legislation if the agency feels it needs that extra authority. Specifically, Schumer wants three things: opt-out defaults should be switched to opt-in, sites should always disclose where the information is going, and there should be some general “guidelines for user privacy” that sites follow. [More]
Insurance Company For Web Cam Snooping School District Freaking Out
By 4.23.10
The school district outside Philly that has come under fire for installing and using remote webcam software to secretly take 56,000 photos and screenshots of students and others is now in trouble with their insurance company, says the Philadelphia Inquirer. [More]
Blippy Revealing Users' Credit Card Numbers To Internet
By 4.23.10
UPDATE: Blippy is taking this seriously. [More]
Loads More Data In A Tweet Than Just 140 Characters, & More To Come
By 4.23.10
A tweet. A seemingly innocuous 140-character piece of data shared over Twitter. That’s what you see as a user, but inside, there’s much more. Raffi Krikorian has cracked open a tweet to show you all the data that can be inside, like your geolocation, bio, name, etc. And last week, along with their advertising initiatives, Twitter announced that they’re adding “annotations,” which will allow developers to add just about any kind of data inside a tweet. This could spark a lot of fun innovations, but anytime you’re opening up more data, there’s always the potential for abuse. In any event, it’s cool to check out a tweet under the hood: [More]
Facebook Used To Make Partners Delete Your Data After 24 Hrs. No Longer.
By 4.21.10
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning that Facebook will toss a policy that made developers and partners with access your data to delete it after 24 hours. Now they can just keep it. Turns out the privacy policy hindered growth:
Zuckerberg told Inside Facebook: [More]
Delete Your Facebook Account Forever
By 4.20.10
Whether you’re trying to get a job and worried about snoopy new bosses, sick of maintaining a virtual profile constantly bombarded with increasingly useless updates and pings from people that you decreasingly actually know, fed up with Facebook’s attitude towards their users, disgusted with your addiction to it, or just want you, your personal details and habits, and photos, out, deleting your Facebook profile can be done in a few easy steps: [More]
Should Google Be Broken Apart?
By 4.20.10
The consumer group Consumer Watchdog is planning to ask the Justice Department to “launch an antitrust action against the search giant and seek remedies including a possible break up,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The group will host a press conference in Washington, D.C. tomorrow where it will argue that there’s enough evidence to warrant antitrust action from the feds. [More]
Facebook Kills More Of Your Privacy For Cash
By 4.20.10
Yesterday, Facebook announced an awesome new feature that lets anyone see your current city, hometown, education, work, likes, and interests, even if you’ve set your profile to private. Will this benefit individual users and their friends? Not unless the only thing you remember about your dear friend is that they enjoy leather-play and you’re willing to scroll through reams of headshots to find them. No, this new privacy erosion is for the real clients of Facebook: advertisers, and the data-mining minions that toil on their behalf. However, there are two ways to be totally private. [More]
