I wrote in January about the faculty Facebook may possess for tracking your browsing history. I made brief mention of the fact that logging out of Facebook may not prevent further tracking. It’s this last point that caused a stir this week as Nik Cubrilovic’s post got picked up by the press.
His follow-up post describes Facebook’s response, but the ‘tracking’ cookie to which I was referring has not been removed. According to Nik’s post, Facebook admit this will remain after logout to track the browser, but for ‘safety and spam purposes’.
According to this WSJ article, ‘not all of the data is logged’. That’s good.
The bottom line for me is that Facebook are so powerful that they need to be as answerable to their populous as a government. That means a certain level of transparency and being clear about their intentions. If they go back on their word, who holds them accountable? Are our laws even adequate? Should Facebook be audited, or should we just trust them?
I don’t expect I’d be too happy about having my servers audited, but I’m not Facebook. When nearly half a billion people log into your site each day to give you their data, you have a serious amount of responsibility on your shoulders.
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I was just starting to think I should shut up about Facebook for a while after my last two posts, but then I enabled the new Timeline profile and saw this:
Wow.
This adds a “Health and Wellness” Life Event to your Timeline.
(Timeline is new Zuckspeak for Wall, and Wellness is American for, erm.. Health)
Why would you tell a company that sells data that you were ill? … seriously, why?
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Picture the scene: I’m on the Tube and I see an attractive girl, so naturally I take a photograph of her without her permission or knowledge. Then when I get home I upload my photo to the public Internet for other men to look at. I also make a note of the location and time, and post that too. Can you imagine if a website facilitated and even encouraged that? There would be outrage, right? Read more…
People think I’m crazy for deleting my Facebook wall each day. When I’m put on the spot about this (usually after a few beers) I tend to rattle on like a deranged conspiracy theorist and generally make it much worse for myself.
One comment usually brings the issue home quite nicely though. I ask:
“How often to you mention being drunk, or being hungover on your Facebook wall?”
- the answer is invariably “often”
“What if in five years you can’t get life insurance because you’ve been profiled as a high risk for alcohol-related illness?”
Should I be paranoid?
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I recently came across this research into risk reduction strategies for using Facebook – particularly by teenagers. The main article talks about “Super-Logoff“, but it was a comment below the article that educated me about “Whitewalling“.
I love this. The simple idea that yesterday’s wall posts are yesterday’s news. Not only may they be irrelevant, but once forgotten who knows how they may come back to bite you? They’re still there, discoverable by other users and of course by the API.
These insights challenge my assumption that the next generation of adults won’t care about privacy. Teenagers may not have quite the same concerns as I do about these issues, but it’s fascinating to see how a website (designed by adults) leaves them to solve their own problems their own way.
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