Posts Tagged ‘privacy’
Rogue Facebook apps can now access your home address and mobile phone number | Naked Security
Time to revisit your facebook privacy settings again:
Facebook has announced that developers of Facebook apps can now gather the personal contact information from their users.
Read more…Rogue Facebook apps can now access your home address and mobile phone number | Naked Security.
Facebook – How To Opt Out Of Instant Personalization
Facebook is getting bigger and sharing more info. It’s time to revisit your privacy settings and make sure you’re not opting into anything automatically.
First stop is “Instant Personalization“, which basically allows FB partner sites to gather your info. Opt out by going to your Account –> Privacy Settings, then click on the Edit Settings under Instant Personalization:
Once there, you need to uncheck the setting that allows partners to personalize their site based on your public info:
Secondly, you’ll need to block each application (partner website) individually. This was harder to find. Currently, there are only three partner sites. I was able to block them by doing the following:
Click on the following FB FAQ:
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1068#!/help/?faq=17105
This will open up the How Do I Opt-Out of Instant Personalization faq. From there, click on the partner links individually, and select “Block Application” from the left column. Remember, you have to do this for each partner:
Once done, you can confirm these sites are blocked by visiting the Blocked Applications section of the Privacy Settings –> Applications and Websites:
Finally, block what info your friends can share about you to partner websites by editing the settings in the What your friends can share about you page under Privacy Settings –> Applications and Websites:
Here you can edit what can be shared and what cannot. I unchecked everything so that nothing can be shared about me.
Call me paranoid, but in an age when identity theft is rampant, you shouldn’t be automatically opted into sharing your personal info.
Facebook’s New Features and Your Privacy: Everything You Need To Know – PCWorld
This is getting SCARY. So basically, unless you opt out, when you’re logged into FB, and visit a partner site (Currently Yelp, Docs.com, Pandora – but I’m sure the list will grow), the partner site will know you’re a FB user and will ask you if you want to “personalize” the site. By that they mean, they will custom tailor the site based on your “Likes” and “Recommendations” listed in FB. So they will have access to your FB “Public” data. If that’s not creepy enough, how about knowing that they will not have to delete the info they gather about you, from their servers, ever! Also, they will have access to your friend’s data, unless you’re friends specifically block the partner site.
Read more…Facebook’s New Features and Your Privacy: Everything You Need To Know – PCWorld.
Google Douses Privacy Fire — InformationWeek
Google Douses Privacy Fire — InformationWeek.
Recent remarks by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a CNBC interview have set off a firestorm among privacy advocates:
Passing on the opportunity to explain to Bartiromo the difference between trusted friends and multi-billion dollar search advertising companies, Schmidt responded, “I think judgment matters. …If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
And the pretty much sums it up about any online company you deal with. For you Facebookers and Tweeters, and anywhere else you post or upload or download from, you’re putting it out there on a server that get’s mirrored and backed up, and probably indexed by search engines. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”
Why I’m Not A Fan Of Facebook
I’m still wary about social networking. I’m in LinkedIn for professional reasons, but haven’t gotten into the Facebook, MySpace, Twitter stuff. First of all, they pull crap like changing the Terms of Service without giving you a chance to opt out:
I don’t know who’s looking at the photos or what they’re doing with it. Besides the fact that I like some anonymity on the internet (yeah, I don’t want people, especially the wierdos from elementary school searching my name and learning everything about me, my family, my work, etc), I don’t need companies changing the Terms of Service on the fly, especially to say they own my content forever. More info here from Neowin.net.
In general, when you put your name out on the internet, your photos, your blog, your messages, your rants…they’re there forever. They are stored on servers that are backed up constantly. What you post now, or write now, can be out there for a very long time, even if you try to delete it. My suggestion is to stay anonymous. Use multiple email addresses, each for different things, don’t post your name, address, telephone number for all to see.
