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.'"
this is a tragedy... I'm truly sorry for the students who were violated. No snark from me today...
let's have a conversation! let me know what you think.
I wonder how fast they'll fix this issue after major political figures start getting added to "Gay Studs" and "Scouting for Sex" groups?
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
'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.'"
How about instead of giving them some false sympathies deep fried and battered in guilt, served with a side of buzzwords, you put your money where your mouth is? You people don't have a heart to speak of, so it's not going out anywhere -- so why not send them something you actually value, like the cash you earned in extra publicity and selling of their personal data after you outed them?
Your entire business model is built on invasive marketing, selling people's personal data to the highest bidder, and despite numerous high-profile security and privacy failings, including pictures that don't get deleted off servers and remain publicly accessible for years after they've been pulled from user profiles and indefinate storage of all data ever submitted to facebook, even after it has been deleted and the profile removed, you people still have the gumption to say you have "robust" privacy controls? Screw you. Give the kids some money, then maybe I'll believe you actually give a damn.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation. Unfortunately, there are still people, even parents, to whom it matters. Those people are the problem, not Facebook. Facebook is just one more avenue for a person's orientation to be revealed.
The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
The person didn't reveal the information themselves. Facebook allowed someone else to do so. That's the whole point of the article.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I am getting tired of people seemingly surprised when facebook does something not in their best interest - especially privacy wise...
That's what they are in business for. To get and aggregate as much info about you as possible. Security, loopholes, and privacy are secondary. In fact privacy is a dirty word in facebook land. If you give you secrets and info on face book and think only the people you want to know - know, Your nuts. You have told the world. If you want privacy, then don't join the facebook privacy abomination. It's funny that people (like my aunt) think face book is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, bringing people together,.. Nothing is further from the truth..
Don't try to un-friend me since i'm not there.. ever..
If one user gets it wrong - sure, that's a dumb user.
Ten? Yeah.
100? Probably still that, considering how many users FaceBook has.
But they should really take a clue from Coursera - in Daphne Koller's TED talk on Coursera she touches on something very similar, namely students having misconceptions on a subject, and how they instead sort of blame the course material, and help correct the students' misconceptions.
This, by the way, is something we see entirely too little of in many types of development.
Not just software - the Stockholm Metro system has automatic gates that open and close to let you through, if you have a valid electronic ticket. And people get hit by those gates and in some cases hurt or stuck.
The company's response? Educate the users on how to use a fucking automatic door!
Honestly, when I read that, I felt like hitting the spokes person in the face and telling him that he obviously needs to be educated in the use of my fist.
Robust privacy controls', my arse.
I've been added to several,er, 'fairly extreme view' groups without my confirmation/consent. It's a damn nuisance, and I unsubscribe from them as soon as I notice.
But generally I just seem to spend my hour or two a week on facebook turning off all the 'texas hold-em' and other crappy 'OMG!'-type apps so they don't clutter my news feed. I need a checkbox that I can tick that says, 'I only care about what my friends actually post, please discard all application-generated posts'.
Somehow I don't think that one will be turning up any time soon.....
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Those "robust security policies" are nothing but paper walls, that can be slid back or removed entirely at the whim of your host, whose house you're visiting.
And your esteemed and generous host is a businessman who's stated quite clearly that your privacy is for sale for his own profit, and that you are a complete fool for trusting him.
Maybe at some point in the future, people will wise up and stop visiting.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
in reverse, though, also works: anyone that can *only* get to me by FB, I won't want contacting me.
not kidding, not being snarky. its an excellent filter, not being on FB.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"you should never post". Get a clue - it may not be you doing the posting.
Here's the problem. They didn't post. They, in fact, used what little privacy controls they had to shield off any posts and activities that would let on their sexual orientation to friends and the public at large.
Who did post, was the then-president of a choir group called Queer Chorus. He added these two individuals to their facebook group. He did so while the group was set public (an 'open' group).
facebook, in turn, notified all the 'friends' of these two individuals that they had joined the group, because that's just how facebook - in all its "privacy? what privacy?" ways - works.
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.
I suppose if they had never befriended the choir on facebook only dealt with them in person, and the then-president had merely mentioned them in passing in a wall post and somebody who knew them had stumbled on that, and posted about it publicly, then they should simply not have dealt with the choir in person.
Maybe you believe that if they weren't 'ready and willing' to own to being gay, they should just have kept up appearances of being straight through all aspects of life.
Rather dangerously close to an "if you have nothing to hide"-argument, I'd say.
Personally, while I agree that anything you post online should be considered a matter of public record, just like picking your nose from the sanctity of your home doesn't mean people won't talk about it the next day if they happened to look through your windows. But then, I have curtains, and I feel that I can reasonably expect that nobody is going to peer through a small slit in those curtains - just as I feel that I should be able to reasonably expect that if I set facebook settings to hide practically everything about me, that they then don't betray that effort by opening up another vector to third parties that is public by design. Naive in both cases, perhaps, but I certainly wouldn't say that it boils down to blaming the users. It's just not that simple.
f 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'.
I strongly disagree. I have religious friends, I have gay friends, I have some few extreme guys as friends.
These groups does not mix up, but these people are my friends nevertheless.
If all your "friends" think as you, act as you and looks as you, this is not friendship. This is narcissism.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
If you bothered to read the entire summary or article,
...which I did...
you might have noticed that she didn't put anything on Facebook about it. Someone else added them to a group without her permission.
My point exactly. Just being a Facebook user, and having 'friends', can and often does leave one's privacy open to violation, regardless of whatever precautions one takes. So the safest policy is 'just don't go there'.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The pressure can be overwhelming.
Simple solution: Keep more than one Facebook account. I have one for friends, another for family, another for work, and a fourth for people I don't like very much, which I also use for testing plugins and FB apps.
Internet 101: anything you post will eventually become public; if you you want to keep it a secret, don't post it in the first place. The fact that these two individuals thought that they could mantain two different public personas and keep one of them a secret is simply a testement to their ignorance.
But their joining that choir wasn't online.. it wasn't posted by them. The only thing they did wrong was either pursueing their interests by joining the choir or being like everybody else by having a Facebook account. Since science has taught us that everyone who doesn't use Facebook is a horrible murderer-to-be, the latter can't be ruled out-... so they weren't supposed to join that choir?
Tell them to not use facebook.
Seriously, your privacy is in the hands of your friends of friends. Can anyone guarantee that all his friends of friends are "sophisticated" users?
No matter how hard you try, people with a camera will take shots of you and tag you or will talk about you. No settings will save you from that (I believe you can now deactivate tagging of your name, right?)
Facebook privacy model is broken. Quite possibly by design. If you want privacy about tour friends, your opinions, your sexuality, DO. NOT. USE. FACEBOOK.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
This is not just about what you do online, it is about what you and all the people you associate with do online. I am not on Facebook, yet Facebook still manages to collect information about me (and spread it around): people "tag" me in photos, sometimes people invite me to join Facebook, and people might mention me in messages they send to each other on Facebook (including public messages). So despite the fact that I have no Facebook account, at least part of my personal life is being collected by that system.
That is the point of TFA. These people did not announce their sexual orientation on Facebook, someone else did, without their permission.
Palm trees and 8
I do not have a Facebook account, therefore your assertion that everyone has a Facebook account is false. I do not have an account because I cannot be bothered to jump through privacy setting hoops to keep control of information that is mine in the first place. Nothing you put on the Internet is private; put nothing there that you would not announce to a room of friends, family, and coworkers, and future employers. I can never think of anything that I would want to say to all these people at once, so I don't use Facebook.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Read The Fucking Article - she didn't put the information on there, someone else did (and Facebook's extremely poor privacy controls allowed it). That was kind of the point:
Do you understand what this is about? Facebook allows other people to add you to groups - in other words, your 'friends' can basically edit an aspect of your profile. It's bizarrely stupid, and has been a common complaint for a long time, and this wouldn't have happened if Facebook didn't do this, but Facebook defends this practice.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if the loophole here is that you can be added to a group without your involvement or active consent, then surely that gives you an out when your ignorant homophobe of a father sees that you're associated with a queer choir group - say it was a case of mistaken identity or a prank or a troll or anything else you like.
That said, I don't think it's a non-issue when group membership can leak actual or apparent private information; ought to be a simple fix to make it ask before you're added to any group and then the whole problem goes away without anyone getting interrogated about groups they're attached to. The existence of potential deniability doesn't remove the issue, just provides at least some way of coping with problems casued until it's actually fixed.
Ignorant homophobes don't often require much proof.
Correction: only friends can add you to groups but you cannot stop them, only leave when you receive the notification. I thought I saw this setting somewhere but it's either gone or more likely I confused it with another setting.
I guess this system does a lot to encourage group membership. In the same way people wouldn't bother joining they won't bother leaving. Hence Facebook gains a valuable/insidious source of user data typing.
.
Choose your Facebook friends wisely.
I do not have a Facebook account
Do you have any friends that use Facebook on their smartphone? Uploaded photos and tagged you? Mentioned you in a wall post? If so, then Facebook already has an account for you, you just haven't set a password on it yet.
IOW, Facebook has enough users that they can identify gaps in the social graph corresponding to people who don't use Facebook. It's naive to think they don't do anything with this information.
That doesn't sound simple. Sounds like a PITA. Also a violation of the TOS.
There is a privacy setting so you can't be added to groups without your permission which undercuts the claim that they were 'sophisticated users'. To be fair I think Facebook set this to false by default when they added the feature.
And you have to be a Facebook user to apply that setting. And then you must repeatedly find and re-apply it when Facebook rearranges its privacy settings and resets them to default (usually undesirable) values. Even a brief period with the setting the wrong way could be disastrous, if the tagging (and consequent promulgation of the tagging) occur during that time.
Those of us who are not Facebook users can apparently be added/tagged/whatever entirely without permission. For all I know, I've been named and tagged in all sorts of photos/groups in malicious ways. That's a nasty problem for some folks, which will likely remain unresolved until it is regulated in some way. By avoiding and actively denying decent self-regulation, Facebook is almost demanding that its actions be limited by legislation. I have no idea what happens to tags or suchlike applied to Facebook users who subsequently renounce/cancel their Facebook accounts. Potentially yet another divisive issue.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If you are hiding it, you SHOULDN'T have joined such a group.
Of course I haven't RTFA, but from the summary:
...a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval.
So they didn't join the group; a 'friend' added them
Facebook breaks my terms of service too, so we're even!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz