Facebook Wins 'Big Brother' Award in Belgium After Being Declared Worst Privacy Villain (cnet.com)

Facebook won the "Big Brother" award in Belgium on Thursday, after people in the nation reached a conclusion that the social juggernaut is the ultimate privacy villain. "Facebook is a multi-billion dollar company that has one commodity - you!" said Joe McNamee, Executive Director of European Digital Rights. From a CNET report: Facebook, nominated by international digital advocacy group EDRi, won after being criticized for its default privacy settings in a unanimous decision. The social network didn't respond to requests for comment. "Facebook has access to a wide range of personal data, and it tracks your movements across the web, whether you are logged in or not," EDRi said. "And the devil is in the default: To opt out, you are expected to navigate Facebook's complex web of settings."

Comments

Its real simple....

[CaptnCrud]

Nothing is free.

What gets me, is people that get there underpants all in a twist over "creepers" getting their phone number online.... ....then they plunk family photo's, past schools, past relations, eating habits, geo-location data, moments of zen on the toilet, and just about every bit of trivial/non-trivial info they can muster.... ....to some nebulous company online....

Its not that bad.

[Snufu]

It's worse. At least Big Brother left the proletariat alone. Big Zucker wants access to all.

Re:Isn't that the point?

[Dr. Evil]

I put Google as the worst. They started as a search engine and making revenue from advertising. Which isn't so bad.

They expanded into email, which seemed a reasonable way to get more advertising revenue.

Then they bought online media through Youtube, which was great for their strength in content delivery, and provided more vehicles for ad revenue.

But somewhere they stopped saying "don't be evil" and now they link your accounts in all the services they acquire, track your dns lookups, your searches, your phonecalls, your contacts, your webpages (through fonts), your map searches, your every location through traffic, they converted your email address into a social media profile which they track as ruthlessly and lucratively as Facebook ever did... They even photograph your home, document your wifi access points etc, etc.

At least Facebook never pretended to be anything other than an ad-based social media company.

Seems odd that yahoo didn't win

[grasshoppa]

I mean, they were literally spying FOR big brother and everything.

I guess maybe the awards were decided prior to recent email scanning revelations?

Re:Facebook?

[myid]

I see your point, but in some cases, online forums are the only alternative. For example, take Slashdot. We see an article that we're interested in, post our comments, and "talk" about it.

Here's another example: I'm a member of an online discussion group. That group switched to Facebook. So in order to read and write posts to that group, I have to use Facebook.

As I said in another Slashdot post on this web page, I created another user id on my computer just for Facebook. I made that user id very restricted, which I hope will protect me.

I wouldn't use Facebook unless I had to, but in this case I do have to.

Google?

[jenningsthecat]

This award is only fair if Google won it before Facebook did. As evil as the Zuck is when it comes to tracking people, I'd say Google is far worse. Also, some security extensions in a browser can put a serious dent in Facebook's tracking with almost no detrimental effects to the everyday browsing experience. But if you consistently apply those same safeguards to Google, the Web becomes a whole lot less usable.