Slashdot Mirror
How Facebook Can Out Your Most Personal Secrets
McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook revealed the sexual preferences of users despite those users have chosen 'privacy lock-down' settings on Facebook. The article describes two students who were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both students were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes responded with a statement blaming the users: 'Our hearts go out to these young people. Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls.'"
It's not that one of them "handed it over" it's that she got added to a group (Queer Chorus, a choir group she had recently joined) whose name alone exposed what she was hiding from her father (among others).
Dont put personal shit on the internet, ever.
unless you are ok with it getting out, because that is inevitable.
I'm about to chew out one of the "don't post it if you don't want it known" commenters, hit refresh to see if somebody else already did, and got distracted by you post.
As much as I dislike facebook, you seem to be unaware of its workings (when they work and don't 'accidentally' break, etc.).
Only friends can add you to a group (unless school group, etc.). If you're being added to 'fairly extreme view' groups, then I guess you have 'fairly extreme view' facebook 'friends'. If you'd rather not be part of those groups, you may wish to review the status of that 'friendship'. If you value the 'friendship' but would prefer that you don't get added to any groups, there was (is?) a trick: join meaningless groups to hit the group limit, then ignore everything from those groups. When you want to join a group, drop one of those groups and join up. Down side: if one of those groups becomes meaningful, you may become associated with those.
For applications, you can actually ignore the application. Upper right corner of the application's post, hit ignore.
Alternatively, go to your account settings, privacy, edit settings, 'applications and websites', disable platform applications.
Until it 'accidentally' breaks. Or facebook makes another change for the benefit of their users, then waits to see if the criticism is bad enough to reverse the change (at which point the damage is already done), or take their losses from the vocal few leave the change intact because it's a net positive.
If you tell Facebook your secret, it's not a secret anymore and you're a moron for thinking it would be.
The problem isn't what they told to Facebook. The problems is that the girls got added to some queer-themed group. group-adding on facebook doesn't require user confirmation nor anything.
A 3rd party just clicked on a group button while the girls were online, and their homophobic parents saw "Girl1 and Girl2 joined group 'lesbian chorus singers' " and freaked out. Without the girls ever needing to do anything, they didn't even need to write their preferences into their profile, and in fact their account could even have been dormant.
The biggest problem is not only that clueless users could mess their own privacy online, but morons can mess other people's privacy as well (and in a few cases including privacy of people who aren't even on facebook themselves).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Huh?
The only time these two individuals ever did anything related to the chain of events was when they friended, or accepted a friend request, from this choir group in the first place. If you're saying that they shouldn't have done that unless they were 'ready and willing' to own, that's fine.
Look, I'm not sure you realize how it works. If someone sends you an invite to a group, you are added to the group. There is no "friending" involved, and there is no control by the recipient of the invite to the group.
How do I know that? Well a few weeks ago, someone sent me an invite to a group. I received the email, but had no interest. In fact I replied to the person's personal email and said "thanks, but no thanks. I don't Facebook, I log in to my account maybe 1 time a week to see the page and what relatives were up to. Two days later, I happened to log in to facebook, and low and behold I'm being spammed by this group on my wall. I never agreed, never "friended" anyone, I was simply notified that I was invited. Magically I'm in that group without any action on my part, and had to remove myself from the group without ever joining.
These teens had the same thing happen. This is a Facebook security issue and has nothing to do with those two teens. In fact, I hope it opens up a nice fat class action case against them and marks the piece of shit that is facebook.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I assume its these guys:
http://www.atheists.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Atheists