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Facebook Opens Up Home Addresses and Phone Numbers

Posted by timothy on from the 1600-pennsylvania-avenue-should-do dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Do you really want third-party app developers on Facebook to be able to access your mobile phone number and home address? Facebook has announced that developers of Facebook apps can now gather the personal contact information from their users. Security firm Sophos describes it as 'a move that could herald a new level of danger for Facebook users' and advises users to remove their home address and phone numbers from the network immediately."

21 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. Message from Facebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Dear users:

    Fuck you.

    Cordially,
    Mark Zuckerberg

    1. Re:Message from Facebook by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Dear Mark,

      Fuck you.

      I wonder if this is a tactic to see just how much bullshit people will put up with.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Message from Facebook by bfree · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I wonder if this is a tactic to see just how much bullshit people will put up with.

      With each successful push by Facebook they can re-evaluate their company upwards and until they have reached the point where such a move threatens the perceived value of the company they will push further. Once they find the point at which the value is threatened they will revert the last change and sell up.

      --

      Never underestimate the dark side of the Source

    3. Re:Message from Facebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It always is. Every time Facebook introduces something, they just do it and see where it gets them... hoping some things people won't notice or care. Zuckerberg's own emails/texts have elucidated that he thinks Facebook's users are all suckers and idiots. He has no sense of ethics... every step is just to see what kind of privacy-violating crap they can push because their entire model is predicated upon out-of-sight/out-of-mind selling of information to third parties in lieu of in your face advertising.

    4. Re:Message from Facebook by madprof · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's OK. I'm on Facebook but only for social purposes. So arguably even less important than LinkedIn.

    5. Re:Message from Facebook by mjwx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I wonder if this is a tactic to see just how much bullshit people will put up with.

      By my experience, the answer to that is quite a bit.

      Just recently I decided to test just how much trolling it would take to get one of my "friends" to unfriendly me. He wasn't really a friend, I added him back in the heady days of 2007 when we added everyone and their dog. Lets just call him Frank, Frank's a bit childish and petty to start off with so I thought he'd be a perfect target. Better yet he just started to use his facebook page as an amateur marketing tool for some "artists" he was "managing" (meaning local performers he kind of hung around with). So Frank is also a bit of a pillock.

      Frank had already blocked me because I own an Android phone and Frank didn't like posts about the latest thing I was doing with it so I had to post under Franks posts. I began with intellectual trolling, countering his arguments with logical discussion, this normally ended up with "you don't know what you're talking about" being the height of his counter arguments but nothing else. After a while I moved onto Grammar Nazism, and the responses elevated to ad-hominem.

      After about a week I elevated to obvious trolling, First Post and popular memes, most of these just got deleted. After about a week he disappeared from Facebook. He still logged on but stopped posting. Finally 2 weeks later he launched one of his bad attempts to market some band, I could of kept going with conventional trolling but instead I took the nuclear option and hit him with a two girls and one cup link. 20 minutes later I received a phone call from Frank, literally in tears asking me to stop and I simply asked him why didn't he just unfriendly me. Still sobbing he said he doesn't want his friend count to go down. I was already in the process of un-friending Frank. Frank took a lot of abuse for a tiny bit of social status, I think many Facebook users would be the same.

      I've got two facebook accounts, one is my real friends (now excluding Frank and most people like Frank who I couldn't give a rats clacker about) which is a very small list. The second is an account not under my real name which has everybody added including a lot of Thai and Philippino girls (I live in OZ, it's easy to pop over to the phils for some cheap, no strings attached action, they get de-friended when they start to ask for a lot of money).

      BTW, I'm not that much of a sociopath, this is not a normal experiment for me and I was just curious as to how much abuse it would take. It kind of spiralled out of control towards the end.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  2. Another option by Ariastis · · Score: 5, Informative

    Easier option :

    Account - Privacy Settings - Apps and Websites (Bottom) - Turn off platform apps

    Bye bye Farmville / Cafe World / Fortune cookie notifications.

    Bye bye info sharing with ueseless apps.

    I have yet to find anything I miss from that pile of junk.

    1. Re:Another option by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And you trust FB to honor your choice of options?

    2. Re:Another option by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And you trust FB to honor your choice of options?

      Which is the real problem.

      Facebook is no longer just a website run by a couple of college kids. It is a business - a big business - and like any business their number one priority is making as much money as possible. This is especially true now that Goldman-Sachs has invested $500 million and is trying to get others to invest another Billion or so. No matter how much lip service is given to "privacy" it is no accident that their privacy settings are hard to figure out, don't really do anything and completely deleting a profile is difficult, assuming that they actually delete anything at all. This is by deliberate design because Facebook's business model demands that they must be able to sell your personal information to advertisers.

    3. Re:Another option by fishexe · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And you trust FB to honor your choice of options?

      Which is the real problem.

      Facebook is no longer just a website run by a couple of college kids. It is a business - a big business - and like any business their number one priority is making as much money as possible.

      Sadly, this is one big business that was probably creepier when it was just a website run by a couple of college kids, one of whom once said about people's Facebook data, 'People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks.' At least now he has investors to sometimes keep him in check, a little bit, maybe.

      --
      "I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
  3. Never had them there in the first place by coolmadsi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I never put information that detailed up there in the first place. Partially for this sort of reason, but also partially because not everyone on my friends list needs to know all of it (or would care if it was there). Anyone who would want to know, already does.

  4. Sophos: "New level of danger for Facebook users" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Share this Article on Facebook.
    Comment by signing in with your Facebook Account.
    Like us on Facebook.

  5. Who didn't see this one coming? by waddgodd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I mean, really, did anybody actually expect facebook to not sell your information to the highest bidder? If you put up real information, expect it to be used. The solution: LIE like a rug! Tell them your home address is 1060 W Addison, Chicago, IL (yeah, that one's kinda lame, copying SNL is good only for laughs). Tell them your phone number is 555-1212. Whatever, be creative.

    --
    Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
  6. An even better option... by mfearby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...delete your account! Well, at least do your best to delete as much of it as you can. As soon as I learnt years ago that you could never delete your Facebook account I knew never to sign up to that rubbish. And Facebook have vindicated my decision every step of the way ever since.

    You'd be a complete nutjob to be using Facebook. I hope that Diaspora is made available to the public in some form this year, though I'm reasonably content with Twitter.

    1. Re:An even better option... by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You'd be a complete nutjob to be using Facebook.

      You'd be a "nutjob" to trust any vital information to Facebook. But I submit to you that there are millions of highly educated and/or computer savvy facebook users. Classifying them all as "nutjobs" is silly. I have a facebook account. I don't post anything on my profile or anywhere else that I consider to be important. I don't post pictures of my children on Facebook (and nor does my wife).

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  7. Just you wait by tiberiumx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah, delete all you want now. Next Facebook will open up the history for every field. Think of the cool 'dating/breakup timeline' an application could build.

  8. Re:This is a seriously bad idea! by SimonTheSoundMan · · Score: 5, Informative

    It seem not jut your information, but also you friends.

    I noticed this for some apps:

    Access my friends' information
    Birthdays, Religious and political views, Family members and relationship statuses, Significant others and relationship details, Home towns, Current locations, Likes, music, TV, movies, books, quotes, Activities, Interests, Education history, Work history, Online presence, Websites, Groups, Events, Notes, Photos, Videos, Photos and videos of them, 'About me' details and Facebook statuses

    Why on earth would Facebook want to give this information to third parties, and worse to ones you have not given permission to, but your friend has.

  9. Re:This is a seriously bad idea! by Freaky+Spook · · Score: 5, Informative

    It really is a gold mine for identity theft in the wrong hands.

    Most phone support for companies only need Phone number, address and DOB for an identity confirmation and all it takes is for someone to get access to someone's credit card account for them to be able to completely steal their identity for dodgy bankloans or being able to get drivers licenses/passports.

  10. Re:why stop at addresses and phone numbers? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe the moderator considered it funny that someone thinks if he removes all his data from Facebook, it is no longer stored there?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  11. Strike back and delete your account by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Facebook is getting too invasive. Every website that has a "like this" button can find out some information about you. Facebook probably knows more about your online habits than Google. They WILL sell this information, too. Unlike Google, they have no other interest in collecting it than to resell it to data miners. They have a history of not respecting your privacy.

    Don't put up with FB any more. Delete your account. Log in and go to this URL:

    http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

    Clear out your facebook cookies to make sure that the deletion sticks (it will be reverted if you log in within two weeks, including via those websites that have FB widgets on them). I have done this and I am happier: I know my friends better. I have a fuller social life and I spend much less time on meta-socializing (all the things that go into organizing a social life, like FB). It is great.

  12. Re:Duh? by 0xDEAD · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not magically but legally different: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/04/dnc.shtm. It is illegal to cold call mobile numbers and Facebook should be held liable for any crimes committed by the selling of this information.