Slashdot Mirror
Woman Sues Blockbuster for Facebook Privacy Violations
Chris Blanc writes "A Texas woman has sued Blockbuster over its activities relating to Facebook's Beacon tool. The movie rental service has been reporting user activity to Facebook since Beacon launched last November, which the plaintiff says is a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act."
We need more info -- can someone please post her name, address, phone number and video rental preferences?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Social networking sites, and Facebook in particular, seem to be increasingly undesirable.
Apart from not wanting people such as potential employers to gain access to profiles that are by default made openly accessible, security vulnerabilities are particularly worrying, given the fact that social networking accounts often contain detailed personal information in context (i.e. not just a name, but a name connected to a university, email account, other people, images etc.) Add to that advertising schemes that intentionally deliver users' data to third-parties, and you have a dangerous mix, especially considering the average user's lack of awareness regarding safe-guarding personal data.
Amnesty International
Blockbuster's user agreement includes a wavier of your rights under the Video Privacy Protection Act. That's why I don't shop there.
I wouldn't expect anything else.
What do you think all this credit card tracking and online accounts and frequent-buyers club bullshit is about?
It is all for companies to be able to direct their advertising more effectively. That is their incentive in providing these tools.
If you don't like this sort of intrusion into your lives, then why not take control of your own governance and change things?
These first generation social networks are going to be the source of a lot of regret. We can only hope that the damage is minimal and that the lessons are learned quickly.
Regardless of what is happening, i doubt facebook will every retire beacon. It will end up being fairly profitable for them. In fact, based on their CPM, that is probably the most profitable part of their business, and its the part that pisses off their users the most.
Really, when will mass market social network like facebook ever turn a profit? The only way to do that is to open the gates to their walled gardens. The only walled garden sites that really and truly make money are subscription based ones where you have to pay to go through the gate.
bang her all day, or no way?
Newsfollow.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Interesting... part of the issue seems to be that the opting out happens at the Facebook side.
These fixes should relieve any concerns in Harris' lawsuit, right? Wrong. There is a difference between reporting the data to Facebook and publishing it to a user's news feed by default, and Blockbuster is still engaged in the former.
It seems that if your two accounts are linked, there's no way to stop Blockbuster from sending the data to Facebook; only your feed preferences keep it from popping up.
Oh, hey there, Malicious Link! I almost didn't recognize you without your -1 Troll goatee!
From the privacy policy
Now, that's pretty vague, but if you take it at face value (HAH!), it would imply that they don't have you waive your rights under this law.However, they do have some pretty crappy privacy when it comes to any comments you post to their website (ratings and such): From the TOS :
Your right to privacy on video rental records used to be dictated by what ever agreement you had or lacked. But then Robert Bork was nominated to the supreme court. At that time a reporter obtained his video rental history and published it. The politically charged backlash created a federal law mandating the privacy of those records.
In otherwords, video rental records have a protected status that is federally recognized. it's not the same as most other information about you. it might even be more protected than your credit history!
Now this is a civil suit ($$$) not a prosecution, so that law is only out there saying what the standard of conduct expected of blockbuster is and is not a direct factor in the trial. I would guess that block busters agreements reasonably allow them to share your data with 3rd party business affiliates or for purposes of debt collection. However, I think the expectation is that your records are not public records.
Facebook might be the loosely defined bussiness affiliate, but most people would probably say it's public. And you did not really intend to direct them to share your borrowing records, nor at the time you agreed with facebook to share certain data could you have anticipated that blockbuster would become a bussiness affiliate. They really needed to negotiate that with you.
finally just because you sign a "wavier" does not mean you cannot sue. As I understand it, you can never sign away your right to sue. The wavier simply makes it hard to win.
I note that recently Netflix ran into a problem too. Their supposedly anonymized rental records used in their contest to improve movie selection turns out to have enough information content that clever googling can re-associate names with a large fraction of the people in the data base. (e.g. they mention movies they watched somewhere on the web and this can be correlated). Some group in texas actually did the reverse calculations and showed it worked.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If my name is Abrahamo Lincolni and there are forty Abrahamo Lincolni's on Facebook, how would beacon reliably link the Blockbuster account to the account on Facebook? IP? CC? Address? Email address? Those seem unreliable since the user can enter different info on different sites.
Or does the user have to manually link the two accounts together for beacon to work.
So what if you don't subscribe to Facebook, do they turn your information over to them anyway?
Take it to its ultimate extreme: government by social networking. This link appears in the thread right above this one: http://www.metagovernment.org/
I would rather have an open source government than a FaceBook government. That is our only choice, since it is unlikely that we will keep using the old system for much longer.
I think people clearly see the danger of this beacon feature abstractly. But like me provide two examples that may show the problems in more context:
Example 1: Man buys book "How to Quit Your Job and get a Better Job for Dummies". His employer sees it on his profile and passes on the man for a job promotion, why promote someone who is looking to quit.
Example 1a: Same as above but man was buying the book for a friend unhappy with job. Man wanted his friend to find a job as enjoyable as his own.
Example 2: Man buys a book "Surviving AIDS" for a college project. His neighbors now think he has AIDS.
Example 2a: Man gets AIDS 10 years later. Denied for treatment by health insurance company as a pre-existing condition, based on his purchasing the book 10 years ago.
Why isn't this shit being deleted again?
So what's your home address, phone number, birthdate and SSN?
Sorry to puncture your idiotic notions with healthy reality.
That's from Facebook's "privacy" statement. That said, I'm not sure the lady has any right to this lawsuit, as it is fairly explicitly stated that there are no rules.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
I am astonished how otherwise intelligent people never stop to think how easy it is to "anonymize" their Facebook accounts but still have their close friends recognize them. For example, when creating an account:
* Use a nickname instead of your real name.
* Use a disposable email account.
* Don't bother filling out info like, phone numbers, home address, gender, relationship details.
* Don't fill out any other sensitive info, or use fake, or humorous data only your friends would understand.
* Make use of FB's extensive privacy settings to lock out access to non-approved friends.
* Turn off FB's "social ads" feature.
* Use Firefox with Ad Blocker Plus enabled.
* Block suspicious or undesirable apps.
You can still enjoy these social web sites without advertisers or employers getting any useful, real information on you.
Because YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Elaborate please? I mean really, this is just like the old ass hole goatse links. Why aren't they just simply deleted?
Block Beacon from ever being accessed by your Web browser.
The sites are:
http://.facebook.com/beacon/*
http://facebook.com/beacon/*
In the words of a slashdot user's sig who shall remain anonymous,
"Censorship is always more offensive than that which is censored. Always."
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Haha, well I think thats true in almost all situations. But say someone spammed what he did 100 times. What I'm trying to get at is, there is a limit.
No, what you are getting at is that there is a limit for you and you think that limit should apply to everyone. Of course that's what censorship is.
Browse at +3.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
lol, you /.ers are a feisty bunch. Ok, so think of this example. I want to kill you to express myself. Why would you censor me?
Are laws against murder "censorship" against "violent expression"?
Goatse = (attempted) eyeball murder.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Perhaps instead of a deletion, a {work unfriendly} advisory in brackets could be added.
There is a real problem with some links in some places. Especially when they are presented at a site that is somewhat "work/family safe" oriented. I say safe orented because it is well known that people surf this site at work or in front of the kids. Purposely hiding the true origin of a link to trick people into viewing it is about as stupid as it can get.
And no, it isn't censorship to delete a link that is fed through a proxy in order to obfuscate the origin so that people who wouldn't otherwise click on it could be tricked into doing so. If the point was to post a link to something, then the link to it would be posted and not bounced from a assumed safe domian. In case your wondering, http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0oGkwkgCAlIK5YAl_5XNyoA/SIG=1hr6qq1f/EXP=1208637856/**http%3A//slashblog.notlong.com/ is the same as going to http://.slashblog.notlong.com/
And yes, I purposely broke both links. The first one can be followed and anyone with half a brain can fix the other after opening it. It you have doubts, you can go up and click on the original to verify.
Well, what his post really does is prevent me from expressing myself by intentionally crashing my browser. Temporary of course, but it prevents me none the less.
Well, you see, I'm for the "censorship" of spam. Spammers are a minority of users I'd like to see disenfranchised of everything but breathing. Well, maybe that too.
Saying that a spam filter is censorship is exactly like saying arresting someone for murder is "censorship." They're both non-sequitors, IMHO, TUIA (To Use an Internet Acronym>)
DATABASE WOW WOW
Gotta love NoScript. First it stops that annoying "Rickroll screen that moves around and annoys the hell out of you", and now this website too?
Is it legal to marry a program?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Well, I don't use these sites, so maybe I'm talking out the arse. But the way I see it, the root of all evil isn't that they're social networking sites. It's that they're run by evil fucks who have no qualms about raping your privacy for a quick buck. And have found equally evil fucks (e.g., Blockbuster) who cheerfully ignore not just your privacy, but also the law, in their race for more effective advertising. I.e., again for a buck.
;)
There's nothing to say that other sites couldn't do the same, other than personal scruples. (Including not asking for that much private data to start with.)
E.g., Slashdot could share the data the same way. E.g., if you seem to aggree with user John Doe (e.g., you added him to friends, or modded him up more than once), then it may interest you that he rented "Dilbert Does Detroit" and "Gay Blowjobs volume 13." You know, maybe you'd take that as a movie recommendation
E.g., AOL essentially already did that kind of a privacy violation when they released those people's search strings. Not as marketing, sure, but part of an "omg, someone code a better search engine than Google, please, they're eating our lunch money" fit.
There's nothing to say they, or a similar company couldn't do the same. E.g., if you use AIM or pretty much any major IM program, they have your data and your contacts list. Maybe if you're good enough a friend with John Doe to have it on your contacts list, well, see above, you might be interested in those movies too. (Or, of course, maybe he's your co-worker, or boss, or the pastor in your bible study group. In which case I guess it will be even more interesting to know that;)
E.g., GMail has not only your address book and mail traffic history to data-mine if they wanted to, but also who sent a GMail ivitation to whom in those marketing stunt days. It's a fairly safe assumption that people sent the first invites to their friends and family, and only moved on to perfect strangers if they still had any left. Maybe if you sent your first GMail invitation to John Doe, you like him enough to take his history of movie rentals as a recommendation.
E.g., almost any MMO makes you enter a ton of personal data and is used by a lot of people as, basically, a social site in 3D. It's fairly trivial to look who's on your friends list, who you're grouping with a lot or talking to a lot, who else is in your guild, who you've brought to the game (e.g., via those "invite a friend, get a free week!" incentives), etc, and start showing them what else you rented or bought.
Etc.
And there's nothing to say that such data can't be equally accessible to a potential employer. (There are already people who go "I led a guild on WoW" when they apply for a management position.) Or outright sold to any potential employer who wants to pay a few bucks for it.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that it's not just social sites: You already give a lot of data about yourself to a lot of people. And at the moment in a lot of places there's nothing except wishful thinking to reassure you that they won't use it. _Probably_ most of them would rather not lose your business by posting your private stuff on a billboard. But as we see here, Blockbuster didn't think twice, and Facebook had nothing to lose anyway.
Sure, you can be paranoid and avoid giving any personally identifiable data, but if the problem gets too widespread, it can be just as much a problem if you're the only guy who is an information black hole. Sorta how the early stealth ships were actually too good at absorbing radar, so they were actually quite visible to radar as a hole in the ocean. If you're the only guy for whom an employer can't find any trace on the net, well, maybe you have some dark secret to hide.
Methinks it would be high time to swing the law bat at that kind of problem.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Censorship is what the government does, using threats of punishment. The owner of a message board deleting posts is not censorship.
This is not censorship. This is common sense, keeping the place clean, etc.
No, but I think that people like you who think that censorship is good should be censored.
Oh, wait...
I hate printers.
-[d]-
The FBI getting a librarian to tell them what you have been reading, well, that's obviously evil. But this is business-to-business. Isn't it great to see free and unbridled libertarian capitalism? I mean, hey, who's forcing her to use Blockbuster?
On the other hand, can it really be that the Reagan era schooled generation is starting to see that corporations _can_ be evil?
Yea, I think thats a good idea to flag posts like that.
As long as the information is still there it's not censorship.
I think the point is that nobody should have the authoritative power to simply delete messages.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I personally don't mind if they have the power or not. I mean the information in question was crafted in a way to trick people into viewing it. I hardly see that as free speech or anything I am concerned with. I liken it to a scam attempting to mislead a person for whatever gain and I don't care if it is deleted. I would be just as satisfied if not more so with a "not work safe" tag or something surounding the link to inform people of the dangers of it though.
you bastard.
i guess i've been away from "teh internets" too long and i fell for that.