The furor over facebook’s privacy problems has recently escalated. There are several parts to this:
- If you are logged into Facebook but then surf around the web, you will be transmitting personal details from your facebook presence to the other web sites
- When other people surf the web, they will be transmitting data about their relationship to you. This seems like the worst example.
- Trying to improve your privacy settings requires negotiation of a dozen pages with 170 different privacy settings.
There is now an organized protest to avoid logging in to facebook on 6/6/2010. That’s an easy one. I think it’s time to dial back and see what it feels like to not use facebook. Unfortunately I’m logged in on so many places that it will require a witchhunt to log out everywhere. Anyway, this blog post will still eventually show up there, but I won’t.
One of the recent events that annoyed me is that people have been giving one of my email addresses to facebook in trying to add me as a friend. This was apparently caused by someone uploading their email contact list, but in doing this they gave private information between the two of us to a third party, namely facebook. I am always appalled by how freely people will give away private information belonging to someone else, and think nothing of it. Facebook is openly preying on this ignorance. Shame on both of you.