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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 you are signed in to your Facebook account, Beacon is running. If you then go to Blockbuster to do anything on their site, Beacon associates your FB account (the specific Abrahamo Lincolni that is you, and none of the other 39 Abe's on FB) with your Blockbuster account, and reports that association to Blockbuster.
If you didn't log out of FB before closing that tab, Beacon is (I'm pretty sure) still running, and will still do the same thing when you log into Blockbuster or any other Beacon merchant.
Anyone up for a boycott of all merchants who use Beacon?
Here's how:
Beacon is a cookie.
You log in to Facebook, cookie is placed. You later log out of Facebook, do other stuff on your computer.
Then, you log into Blockbuster.
Beacon stores info about what you do in your Blockbuster account (e.g., rented [movie]).
The next time you log into Facebook, Beacon tells Facebook the information it's stored.
And that's how it knows; no special input needed on the user's part.
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.
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.
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.
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.