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Facebook Founder's Pictures Go Public
jamie passes along a Newsfactor piece that begins "In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook's recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users' profiles, photos, and friends lists available on the Web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up."
I clicked the link in the summary and I didn't find any pictures. So after a quick search I found this http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-private-photos-2009-12#with-girlfriend-priscilla-chan-from-her-album-moments-have-you-seen-a-sweeter-thing-today-probably-not-1 Enjoy!
I am really worried about the fact that Facebook has access to data such as people's real name (that's the point of it, right?)
Um, no it doesn't. It has no real name verification mechanism, so if you are like me and you go by a nickname among your friends, you can register using a nickname. I think at some point they changed it so that you couldn't change the name easily once you register ('didn't used to be that way in its first year), but if you start out with a pseudonym, they don't stop you.
As for other infos, well, use TOR and litter your profile (and friend list) with a lot of false information so that they cannot separate the truth from lie.
Or, as you said, don't use Facebook.
"For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)"
http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg
Oh, this default is even worse than most people could have imagined!
For example, lets say you go to a party and a "friend" of yours takes a picture of you doing something that looks rather scandalous because you are drunk. And then, your friend uploads the pic to Facebook and tags your name to it. You realize you have been tagged in the photo and you don't want other people to see it. So you untag yourself and send a message to your friend to delete it. However, your friend either doesn't go on Facebook very often or doesn't check Facebook messages so the photo is still up there and there is nothing you can really do about it except pray that nobody else stumbles upon it.
And then suddenly Facebook decides to make everybody's photos Public to anybody. Now this bad photo of you is available to everybody and there is nothing you can do about it except call your other friends in order to get the cell phone number of the guy that took your picture.
Yeah, this default sucks real bad.
http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)
Hey buddy,
I have my account on the highest level of lock-down. However, if you get the URL to my profile, or you're a friend of a friend, you can still see (and I can't block this):
- My friend list, in its entirety
- Pages of which I'm a fan
- Profile photo
- An option to send me a friend request
- Some other stuff
None of which I wanted. My circumstances are somewhat special, because not everyone needs or wants this level of security, but I do, and I used to have it, and now it's gone away.
-P
Score:-1, Funny
Go to your profile and hit the little pencil icon next to it. You can hide your friends list from there. (Thanks to another /. commenter, who pointed this out to me.)
BTW, make sure you lock down the settings on what your friends' apps can see, unless you trust them not to accidentally add malware.
You used to be able to exclude yourself from the system. Now you can't even opt out of the Facebook API, there is information that is accessible to 3rd party developers as long as your friends install an app. Used to be you could opt out of it though. After this whole debacle I ended up requesting deletion of my facebook account, which should be processed in 10 days.