Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Facebook in denial

Facebook is looking at changing it's privacy policy again. This time the idea is to share your data with a "select few" companies in order to "provide you with useful social experiences off Facebook. I can't think of a third party company I would want to share my Facebook information with. I can't think of one that I would care that they had it, either, but that's not the point. Facebook is making this an opt-out program. If you should opt-out, the companies are required to remove your data from their records, but that's kind of like telling Pandora to put the bad things back in the box.

In an article in eWeek.com Facebook dismisses the idea that the change has anything to do with advertising. I suppose that could be true. They could be getting paid for the personal data that would be given to the third party rather than use the data for advertising.

Either way, I agree with this Facebook user:

"My privacy is paramount to me and UNLESS I say so explicitly you have no right to provide my data to whoever you think is authorized," wrote Facebook user Harish Menon. "I don't care if it's your mom and you think she's trustworthy; I don't want my data to be given out to anyone unless I say so."
Posted by bknabe at 1:00 AM
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6 comments:

  1. ScottMarch 31, 2010 at 4:12 AM

    Simple solution to protect your data from the Facebook evil empire: cancel your account or don't join in the first place. They don't have my information and they don't have to have anybody else's either.

    ReplyDelete
  2. smadrid717March 31, 2010 at 4:17 AM

    Facebook is the devil. It also causes syphilis.

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  3. BertMarch 31, 2010 at 4:47 AM

    Nah, Smadrid, it's not the devil. His son, perhaps, but not the devil.

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  4. BertMarch 31, 2010 at 4:47 AM

    You're right, Scott. Even in careers that require (or almost require) an online presence there are alternatives to Facebook, and not all of them require you to put up any more information than a name. Of course, there's a downside to that, too. Suppose you don't have a Facebook account, but someone else creates one using your name. You have absolutely no control over what appears on it, which is worse than the almost no control over who sees what's on the account you create. At this point in time the likelihood of that happening is low, but it can be hard and/or expensive to prove that something online is not done by you.

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  5. SimonMarch 31, 2010 at 11:19 AM

    This is ultimately a case of TOS and EULA. Does anyone bother to read these documents? Nope. Is there some scary stuff. Yup.

    In the end, the question is, who owns the information you provided when you signed up.

    The reality is, in the Facebook TOS and EULA, they own it and have the right to distribute; not you.

    The whole, asking permission for things is kind of absurd and is done as a courtesy. You agreed to the TOS, so it is facebooks right, not yours.

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  6. BertApril 1, 2010 at 1:33 AM

    I'm going to have to go back and read the TOS, EULA and privacy policy. IIRC the privacy policy says the info is yours, which would put it in direct conflict. If only I had money to play with it might be fun to see how that played out in court.

    Yes, I really would have fun doing that.

    ReplyDelete

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