There's nothing on Slashdot that really merits privacy. Something like Facebook, where people basically post intimate details of their lives, is a very different thing. What does one really gain by hijacking a Slashdot account?
Who said anything about using unencrypted sites? The only social networking I use is Facebook, and (as of today, at least) they've got an encrypted version.
That's a great point, Ben. I can vaguely remember when I signed up for Facebook, and I'm sure that's how I took it, too. (I didn't fill that part out, though.)
The problem with Facebook in general is that it's been re-purposed. If you remember back that far, Facebook was originally meant to be a place where college students could socialize. Its usage has extended far beyond that, though, so some of the things that the original database was meant to do don't apply. Many people now (myself included) use Facebook primarily to promote themselves in their chosen careers, and end up having many more "friends" on Facebook than they have actual people they're friends with. The "interested in" field has gone through a similar change. I've seen many people online who I know personally are not bisexual, but you'd think they were from their profiles, the way they're treated now. I think that's one of the more troublesome usage changes that Facebook has seen, second only to the influx of corporate profiles.
Advertisers should not be able to see it on Facebook. Whether they turn around and sell private information to those outside of Facebook, I don't know.
Technically, it's the advertisers that will use it or not. Facebook just allows access to the data (with your permission, through your privacy settings). Some people commenting on this story seem to believe that advertisers have access to your information, even if you make it private. It's not clear to me that this is true, but if Facebook is allowing advertisers to target users by personal information that's not made public, that's a fairly large privacy problem. Does anyone have information that Facebook does allow advertisers to target people who don't have that information public?
To the best of my knowledge, there are no controls which allow you to make your profile information public, but not available to advertisers. You have to make the choice whether you want the information to be fully public, or available to just your friends. I have to imagine, though, that if you don't want advertisers to have access to information, you wouldn't want the general public to have access to it, either.
I understand that paranoid has a definite meaning. My parents both work in the mental health field. But, rightly or wrongly, "paranoid" also has a layman's meaning. It so happens that the layman's meaning of "paranoid" is closer to the clinical meaning than you get in a word like "schizophrenic", which to the general public means someone with a split personality. The difference between "paranoid' in the layman's sense and in the clinical sense is just a matter of degrees. Paranoia is an irrational fear that someone or some group is out to get you. While there's a lot of rational fear about security on the Internet, I do think some of it's irrational. (Some people have an excessive fear of cookies, for example, without having an understanding of what they are and what they're actually tracking.)
Concerning Facebook specifically, I think it's important to recognize that nothing going on here is actually intrusion. The users are in control of how much they share, and to whom. (Again, if someone can show me documentation that says that advertisers can access information for targeting purposes that isn't made public, I'll change my tune, but I haven't been made aware of that yet, and if it's the users' choice what they share with advertisers, then it's the users' fault when that information is used to target them (regardless of whether Facebook has a policy about what information can be used to target them).
I agree with you that complacency is the enemy. The problem is, if you tell people that it's someone else's problem if the information that they willingly posted gets used in ways they don't like, you end up with people who're complacent about security, and think they don't have to be careful what they post. And that's to no one's advantage but the scammers.
"Any targeting of adverts based on a user attribute such as age, gender, location or interest, must be directly relevant to the offer and cannot be done by a method inconsistent with privacy and data policies."
I was using paranoid in the layman, common usage sense. I'm certainly not saying that someone worried about their Facebook settings has a clinical mental disorder. In fact, I was only using the word because LBArrettAnderson used it in his post responding to my original post. If you'd rather use the phrase "security-conscious", that's fine by me.
The issue is how the person displaying the ad knows you're a member of the targeted group. It's my understanding that they can only know it if you display it publicly on your profile. If that's not the case, then that's different, but I haven't yet read anything to convince me otherwise.
But this can happen regardless of your privacy settings. You set your profile to include the fact that you are gay. You make that private, and manage to keep it private no matter how many times they change things. But the fact that it's private doesn't mean advertisers can't target ads based on it.
Do you have a source for that information? The article doesn't say that advertisers are targeting private information, or that they can see private information.
This was information that was marked as private, but obviously is not. That's the problem.
Did you read the article? Nowhere does TFA say that the information was culled from people who'd marked their sexual preference as private. All the article said was that the users didn't know why the ads were served to them, because that wasn't disclosed. It also said that it's against Facebook policy to target users based on "sensitive" demographic information (age, gender, and presumably sexual preference). If the article had said that sexual preference was hidden by the users, that would be worth a story.
I'm sure paranoid people wouldn't like it. But paranoid people have the option of either hiding their sexual preference or omitting it altogether. It's not required information, and it's not information that's required to be public.
The only problem I can see for Facebook is that advertisers are violating their policy not to show ads based on sensitive demographic information (age, sex, presumably sexual preference). They certainly need to crack down on advertisers violating the policy, but users still have the ultimate control over how much they share. Advertisers don't need to know your sexual preference unless you made it public. And if you made it public, whose fault is that?
I think you're misunderstanding something. You can make sexual preference private, or not. Hell, you don't even have to disclose your preference, if you don't want to. Now, if advertisers are somehow getting around people's privacy preferences, and accessing that information without it being public, that's certainly a Facebook problem, but I don't see anywhere in TFA where it says that.
The only problem I see in the article is that advertisers aren't supposed to be using sensitive demographic information (sex, gender, presumably sexual preference) to do the targeting. But that's already a violation of Facebook's policies. Facebook should deal with that, I suppose, but even if they do nothing, users can still control what advertisers see. If sexual preference is the kind of information you consider to be only your (or your friends') business, you should configure your profile appropriately. At best, the researchers are causing a tempest in a teapot. There's a fairly easy fix that anyone can implement, without Facebook having to do anything.
Sure, but I think this is a problem on the user end. It doesn't have anything to do with Facebook, per se. If a user is paranoid about it, they can hide their preferences from non-friends or simply not disclose it.
I'm not saying people don't have a cause to be cautious about what to disclose to whom. I'm just saying that it looks to me like Facebook gives you all the tools you need to avoid disclosing things you don't want to disclose to strangers.
If it's on your Facebook status, and you don't have it covered with restrictive privacy settings, you de facto do want the world to know.
I'm all for privacy being respected, but if you put something out there, and don't take the proper precautions that it be hidden if you want it to be, it's on you, not on Facebook. They can't make it much easier to control who sees what. The kind of concerns being raised here were valid maybe a year ago.
The ads were served to males who declared themselves to be interested in other males, and females who declared themselves to be interested in other females.
Exactly where is the problem here? The users are outing themselves. Shouldn't this be filed under, "...and water is wet"?
I think the biggest problem is that the Linux community didn't make a move on usability until it was very late in the game. Fro a long time, the attitude seems to have been, "If you want to use Linux, you'd better be willing to do your research." I can't tell you how many times, back in the late 90's, I'd log on to a forum for Red Hat (5, at the time) and see newbies receiving answers like "RTFM" and "man ". There was an elitism to those days that was definitely off-putting. If you're going to rely on user-based support, those users'd better be friendly.
Another problem is refusing to let commercial software in on the party. For a long time, Linux purists have looked askance at commercial software -- particularly if it was closed source. Thankfully, Ubuntu is starting to change that. I hope it's not too late, but on the desktop, it might be.
I think it's important to point out that the iPad isn't designed for this special case use. They're thin and relatively fragile. For someone with poor motor skills, that's not going to be a great fit. They need to be ruggedized to really work well in that niche.
I dunno. I think that if the government handed them out to the right people, there wouldn't be a lot to bitch about. The trouble is, the minute the government started such a program, bottom-feeders would come out of the woodwork trying to scam the government for their free (and unnecessary) iPads.
I don't mean to defend the medical community, but this isn't as ridiculous as it sounds, if you know the ropes. Every few years, I have to buy a new wheelchair, and even then I need either a prescription or a letter of medical necessity. Insurance companies are pretty hardcore about not paying for things unless you can show you absolutely need them. (I've often wished that just sending a picture of myself in the wheelchair was enough, but alas, no.)
As was noted in the article, the iPad isn't a great fit for a lot of handicapped people. If someone is using a machine that measures eye movement to communicate, they're not at the level where an iPad is going to help them. You need at least a little eye movement. And the iPad is fragile compared to other devices. So it's by no means a device that's going to replace people's needs for $7000 machines.
Having said all that, it's great to see the iPad being helpful to people with these kinds of disabilities. I'm not a big fan of the iPad in general, but there's no downside here.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right. I sit corrected. :( Bummer.
There's nothing on Slashdot that really merits privacy. Something like Facebook, where people basically post intimate details of their lives, is a very different thing. What does one really gain by hijacking a Slashdot account?
Who said anything about using unencrypted sites? The only social networking I use is Facebook, and (as of today, at least) they've got an encrypted version.
That gives the people who use Firesheep a kind of victory by intimidation. Much better to thwart them than to shy away from social networks in fear.
That's a great point, Ben. I can vaguely remember when I signed up for Facebook, and I'm sure that's how I took it, too. (I didn't fill that part out, though.)
The problem with Facebook in general is that it's been re-purposed. If you remember back that far, Facebook was originally meant to be a place where college students could socialize. Its usage has extended far beyond that, though, so some of the things that the original database was meant to do don't apply. Many people now (myself included) use Facebook primarily to promote themselves in their chosen careers, and end up having many more "friends" on Facebook than they have actual people they're friends with. The "interested in" field has gone through a similar change. I've seen many people online who I know personally are not bisexual, but you'd think they were from their profiles, the way they're treated now. I think that's one of the more troublesome usage changes that Facebook has seen, second only to the influx of corporate profiles.
Advertisers should not be able to see it on Facebook. Whether they turn around and sell private information to those outside of Facebook, I don't know.
Technically, it's the advertisers that will use it or not. Facebook just allows access to the data (with your permission, through your privacy settings). Some people commenting on this story seem to believe that advertisers have access to your information, even if you make it private. It's not clear to me that this is true, but if Facebook is allowing advertisers to target users by personal information that's not made public, that's a fairly large privacy problem. Does anyone have information that Facebook does allow advertisers to target people who don't have that information public?
To the best of my knowledge, there are no controls which allow you to make your profile information public, but not available to advertisers. You have to make the choice whether you want the information to be fully public, or available to just your friends. I have to imagine, though, that if you don't want advertisers to have access to information, you wouldn't want the general public to have access to it, either.
I understand that paranoid has a definite meaning. My parents both work in the mental health field. But, rightly or wrongly, "paranoid" also has a layman's meaning. It so happens that the layman's meaning of "paranoid" is closer to the clinical meaning than you get in a word like "schizophrenic", which to the general public means someone with a split personality. The difference between "paranoid' in the layman's sense and in the clinical sense is just a matter of degrees. Paranoia is an irrational fear that someone or some group is out to get you. While there's a lot of rational fear about security on the Internet, I do think some of it's irrational. (Some people have an excessive fear of cookies, for example, without having an understanding of what they are and what they're actually tracking.)
Concerning Facebook specifically, I think it's important to recognize that nothing going on here is actually intrusion. The users are in control of how much they share, and to whom. (Again, if someone can show me documentation that says that advertisers can access information for targeting purposes that isn't made public, I'll change my tune, but I haven't been made aware of that yet, and if it's the users' choice what they share with advertisers, then it's the users' fault when that information is used to target them (regardless of whether Facebook has a policy about what information can be used to target them).
I agree with you that complacency is the enemy. The problem is, if you tell people that it's someone else's problem if the information that they willingly posted gets used in ways they don't like, you end up with people who're complacent about security, and think they don't have to be careful what they post. And that's to no one's advantage but the scammers.
I agree, but gender is part of the policy:
I was using paranoid in the layman, common usage sense. I'm certainly not saying that someone worried about their Facebook settings has a clinical mental disorder. In fact, I was only using the word because LBArrettAnderson used it in his post responding to my original post. If you'd rather use the phrase "security-conscious", that's fine by me.
The issue is how the person displaying the ad knows you're a member of the targeted group. It's my understanding that they can only know it if you display it publicly on your profile. If that's not the case, then that's different, but I haven't yet read anything to convince me otherwise.
But this can happen regardless of your privacy settings. You set your profile to include the fact that you are gay. You make that private, and manage to keep it private no matter how many times they change things. But the fact that it's private doesn't mean advertisers can't target ads based on it.
Do you have a source for that information? The article doesn't say that advertisers are targeting private information, or that they can see private information.
This was information that was marked as private, but obviously is not. That's the problem.
Did you read the article? Nowhere does TFA say that the information was culled from people who'd marked their sexual preference as private. All the article said was that the users didn't know why the ads were served to them, because that wasn't disclosed. It also said that it's against Facebook policy to target users based on "sensitive" demographic information (age, gender, and presumably sexual preference). If the article had said that sexual preference was hidden by the users, that would be worth a story.
I'm sure paranoid people wouldn't like it. But paranoid people have the option of either hiding their sexual preference or omitting it altogether. It's not required information, and it's not information that's required to be public.
The only problem I can see for Facebook is that advertisers are violating their policy not to show ads based on sensitive demographic information (age, sex, presumably sexual preference). They certainly need to crack down on advertisers violating the policy, but users still have the ultimate control over how much they share. Advertisers don't need to know your sexual preference unless you made it public. And if you made it public, whose fault is that?
The only problem I see in the article is that advertisers aren't supposed to be using sensitive demographic information (sex, gender, presumably sexual preference) to do the targeting. But that's already a violation of Facebook's policies. Facebook should deal with that, I suppose, but even if they do nothing, users can still control what advertisers see. If sexual preference is the kind of information you consider to be only your (or your friends') business, you should configure your profile appropriately. At best, the researchers are causing a tempest in a teapot. There's a fairly easy fix that anyone can implement, without Facebook having to do anything.
Sure, but I think this is a problem on the user end. It doesn't have anything to do with Facebook, per se. If a user is paranoid about it, they can hide their preferences from non-friends or simply not disclose it.
I'm not saying people don't have a cause to be cautious about what to disclose to whom. I'm just saying that it looks to me like Facebook gives you all the tools you need to avoid disclosing things you don't want to disclose to strangers.
If it's on your Facebook status, and you don't have it covered with restrictive privacy settings, you de facto do want the world to know.
I'm all for privacy being respected, but if you put something out there, and don't take the proper precautions that it be hidden if you want it to be, it's on you, not on Facebook. They can't make it much easier to control who sees what. The kind of concerns being raised here were valid maybe a year ago.
The ads were served to males who declared themselves to be interested in other males, and females who declared themselves to be interested in other females.
Exactly where is the problem here? The users are outing themselves. Shouldn't this be filed under, "...and water is wet"?
I think the biggest problem is that the Linux community didn't make a move on usability until it was very late in the game. Fro a long time, the attitude seems to have been, "If you want to use Linux, you'd better be willing to do your research." I can't tell you how many times, back in the late 90's, I'd log on to a forum for Red Hat (5, at the time) and see newbies receiving answers like "RTFM" and "man ". There was an elitism to those days that was definitely off-putting. If you're going to rely on user-based support, those users'd better be friendly.
Another problem is refusing to let commercial software in on the party. For a long time, Linux purists have looked askance at commercial software -- particularly if it was closed source. Thankfully, Ubuntu is starting to change that. I hope it's not too late, but on the desktop, it might be.
I think it's important to point out that the iPad isn't designed for this special case use. They're thin and relatively fragile. For someone with poor motor skills, that's not going to be a great fit. They need to be ruggedized to really work well in that niche.
I dunno. I think that if the government handed them out to the right people, there wouldn't be a lot to bitch about. The trouble is, the minute the government started such a program, bottom-feeders would come out of the woodwork trying to scam the government for their free (and unnecessary) iPads.
I don't mean to defend the medical community, but this isn't as ridiculous as it sounds, if you know the ropes. Every few years, I have to buy a new wheelchair, and even then I need either a prescription or a letter of medical necessity. Insurance companies are pretty hardcore about not paying for things unless you can show you absolutely need them. (I've often wished that just sending a picture of myself in the wheelchair was enough, but alas, no.)
As was noted in the article, the iPad isn't a great fit for a lot of handicapped people. If someone is using a machine that measures eye movement to communicate, they're not at the level where an iPad is going to help them. You need at least a little eye movement. And the iPad is fragile compared to other devices. So it's by no means a device that's going to replace people's needs for $7000 machines.
Having said all that, it's great to see the iPad being helpful to people with these kinds of disabilities. I'm not a big fan of the iPad in general, but there's no downside here.
+1x10^1000