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Why Facebook Won't Stop Invading Your Privacy
GMGruman writes "Every few weeks, it seems, Facebook is caught again violating users' privacy. A code error there, rogue business partners there. The truth, as InfoWorld's Bill Snyder explains, is that Facebook will keep on violating your privacy, no matter what its policies say, what promises it makes, or how shocked it claims to be at the latest incident. The reason is simple: Selling personal information on its users is how it makes money, and Facebook is above all a business."
Selling personal information on its users is how it makes money, and Facebook is above all a business.
Why is this news? Nothing to see here, move on please...
No really. Don't let the deadpan delivery fool you into thinking I am not shocked. I am. Really.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
When Facebook announces new privacy-preserving settings for its users, what they mean is "we have implemented a new zero-day exploit that will allow hackers to steal all your info with a simple script and sell it all off on the internet with very little effort."
If you're not paying for the service, you are the product, not the customer.
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...water is wet, the sky is blue, and Elvis is still dead.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I'm sure this will be an unpopular post, but Facebook is NOT violating privacy.
Really, if you post something on the internet and expect it to be private, you are an idiot. You can't reasonably expect privacy on someone else's servers. Once you release information in the wild, you have no control over what happens to it. None. Those privacy settings mean jack shit. They are only veils. In fact, those privacy settings aren't even guaranteed.
If you don't want people to know something about you, don't post it on the internet. It really is THAT simple. If you don't want the evidence to make it to your wife, your boss, or whatever, don't put that evidence in an archivable medium AT ALL. And lastly, if you don't like the way Facebook uses your information, DON'T USE THE GOD DAMN SITE. If you aren't using it, they can't "violate" your "privacy."
And that's what's so sad about this. When friends encouraged me to get on Facebook I told them about the profit model and why they shouldn't contribute to it, but they all had the same response, "who cares?" It was hard enough for them to understand why their personal information would even be profitable in the first place, but for them to actually care was impossible. Lets face it, Facebook users have the same view of privacy Zuckerberg has: they don't value it and they don't understand why anyone would (unless, of course, they had something to hide).
I value my privacy and I find Facebook to be the finest example of everything that is wrong with capitalism. But that's why I'm here on Slashdot and not there.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
If you actually use your real name and personal information on any social networking site, then you are an idiot, plain and simple. You may not even be able to exercise damage control at this point by erasing everything and deleting accounts; it's all still out there somewhere and someone has it -- and in many cases, it's people you never even met in person who you allowed on your friends list in the neverending quest to have more "friends" than your buddies do.
I already know I'm going to get modded down to -1, Troll or -1, Flamebait for posting this, but you can't escape the cold hard truth that so many of you have not been wise, and now you're paying the price.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
again and again; it's old news by now. But there are a whole lot of people who just don't seem to either get it or care. Facebook is really good at exploiting that ancient "be part of the pack or else you'll die" thing that got us through the Pleistocene era.
Nothing and no one should have first amendment restrictions.
FIRE!!!!!!!!!
Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21, @11:51AM(#33974432) rapes babies and strangles puppies!
The military is conducting an operation at coordinates x-y at 11:00AM (EST) on October 22.
Corporations funneling money into political campaigns are merely expressing their political opinions!
Need any other examples?
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Why? Your name is generally a matter of public record. It's not private. Pretty much the opposite, in fact.
If you post any actual private information on a social networking site then you're taking a risk. You might be an idiot, or you might have weighted the costs and benefits and made an informed decision.
Freedom of speech is about expressing beliefs and opinions and facts, that is what the ruling about "FIRE" is all about you are not free to tell blatant false hoods when they could case clear and present danger. This is also how liable, defamation, and slander laws are still permissible.
Beyond this there is no reason to curb freedoms of speech. The whole corporate campaign donations thing is a red herring. That ruling in and of it self is correct. The problem there if you will is the legal fiction that corporations are people and therefore can hide behind the bill of rights in the first place. Corporations are nothing like people:
they don't die eventually as people do
you can't jail them when the misbehave
because their size, wealth, and resources vary so widely as compared with individuals they don't have an equal sensitivity to fines and other defined civil penalties.
If you want to fix this country (USA) for real one place to start would be getting rid of the legal fiction corporations are people, drafting up a fare corporate bill of rights, which might leave some limitations on things like speech.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
A year ago, we launched a privacy site with the goal of providing a safe, secure, simple means to share information using end-to-end encryption. Without going into detail and without mentioning the name of the site, I can tell you that we succeeded and we have a small group of regular users. We don't have an advertising budget, so most users find us through google ("private secure encrypted"). Even those with no knowledge or understanding of how encryption works can figure out how to use this site. Since we collect no personal data, we have nothing to sell to advertisers. Eventually, there will be a nominal fee to use the highest privacy level ("secret"), but anyone creating an account this year will get to use the site free for life (or until the site is sold or terminated).
Since people keep using it, they're sending the message that they don't care about invasions of privacy. It's not too hard to figure out how to avoid this invasion: don't use the site.
One key part about it is that Facebook, and particularly Zuckerberg, is convinced that privacy is an illusory notion at best in today's world. Privacy was all some strange social construct that is now, or soon will be, thoroughly antiquated. It's an impediment to the future; a mental hangup. It's right up there with believing the Earth is flat and the sun revolves around us. The sooner we all realize this the better off we'll be.
Within this philosophy each move that Facebook makes isn't some sort of violation or theft. You can't steal what someone doesn't have. Instead, it is an object lesson to the unenlightened. I, for one, believe this is total bullshit. Then again, I'm also not on Facebook. The movers and shakers in technology have been all about this for a long time: dragging the masses kicking and screaming to that future only he has the genius to see. Usually, they have limited it to technical or economic matters, a'la Bill Gates. Or, like Steve Jobs, they have an overt social vision behind their technological heavy-handedness, but folks generally haven't been too offended by it. Zuckerberg is upping the ante in a dramatic way.
FB cares about privacy in the same way that McDonald's cares about nutrition.
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Funny thing is, GP didn't say he "had nothing to hide" - he said that the stuff he posts on facebook isn't that private anyway, and he doesn't care that it's up there, or that Facebook knows it. He didn't say "I post every detail of my life there," he said "I don't care if people know the details I do post up there."
There's worlds of difference between "I don't care that Facebook knows I like golf (but suck at it), have half a dozen friends who live in New York City, and like rock and alt-country music, and uses that knowledge to display advertisements I might be interested in seeing based on those interests." and "I don't care if Facebook films me having sex with my wife and posts that up on facebook.com/bobsmith_porking_lisajones/livestream, and uses it to sell male enhancement products and plastic surgery."
Reasonable people are able to draw the distinction between these two scenarios. You seem to have missed the distinction. Conclusions that may be drawn from these facts are left as an exercise to the reader. The rule to keep in mind on Facebook is: don't post it if you consider it private information.
You put your data on its server for the purpose of sharing it with others. Any expectation of "privacy" on a system designed to share information seems misinformed, especially when all that information is further shared with third parties (apps) over whom Facebook has no control. You might reasonably expect your FB inbox to be private but that's about the only type of information on the entire site that isn't "shareable."
Plus, if you're not accessing a service exclusively over SSL, do you really care how private the data is that you're transmitting?
rooooar
Socialism 101: the employees own their place of employment. It could be directly, such as a partnership, or via proxy (ie. shares of stock). Period.
Some people prefer a more indirect proxy (ie. a Socialist government). Obviously, *that* model has had problems.
Social Democratic parties prefer the employee-ownership part. But, rather than require it and overturn the whole apple cart, accept that yer gonna have owners exploiting employees, and use social welfare programs to ameliorate the "getting screwed" parts of capitalism.
To manage a social welfare system requires records of the beneficiaries. On the other hand, large firms selling products purporting to ameliorate the "getting screwed" parts of life require records of the beneficiaries, and may sell those records to other firms.
Potaytoes, potahtoes.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I use my real name on facebook. That makes me an idiot? Thanks for the classification.
I tend to believe I'm more informed than the average person. Maybe I'm mistaken. If you believe that social networking sites sharing this type of information is the greatest privacy issue at the moment then you are mistaken.
To provide an example, I recently remortgaged my house. I received no less than 2 dozen mail offers to my home address (the address remortgaged). Most of them were to either offer insurance protection in case I was disabled and couldn't pay my mortgage or to allow me, for a fee, to pay my mortgage more often thus saving money in interest. A service my bank offers for free.
These companies put information on the mailings that could only be found in the mortgage documents, including the principal amount. How did they get this information? All of it is readily available public information available on the internet. Any piece of property in the state I live in has this information available online. This includes deed information such as amount paid and any liens including mortgages and tax liens. These are full images of the documents, including the signature. For many cities and towns tax assessment information is also available: property value, floor plans, property acreage and address.
There are many other examples of information online that compromise privacy. To worry about people putting information they themselves decide to put out there is the least of our worries.
If you actually use your real name and personal information on any social networking site, then you are an idiot, plain and simple.
Exactly!
That's why I always walk around outside wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, a biohazard suit and use a different alias at every shop. Can't let just anyone know my real face or true name - and who knows what dark magics they might weave with a lock of my hair?
Plus it makes everyone who comes to the help desk at work really quiet.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC