I recently saw this paper: “Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like This!”
(download the PDF)
Short version
Zuckerberg's 'open' and 'connected' world
Every time you merely visit a site that displays a Like button, data is sent to Facebook which includes the address of the site you are visiting. Assuming you’ve also logged into Facebook, they have all the information they would need to associate these external page views with your Facebook identity.
What are they actually doing with this data? Possibly nothing, but I don’t see any statement saying “Don’t worry, we don’t store web page URLs you view, even though we could“. The usual guff about ‘anonymized’ data and cookies being required for functionality doesn’t quite cut it with me. This is Big Brother stuff, and they need to be crystal clear about what they could do and what they are doing. Read more…
Direct messaging is one of Twitter’s weakest features. On a platform that is fundamentally about public conversation, this is a one-to-one private messaging system – except it isn’t private – it’s just direct. The new Twitter has improved the messaging interface, but this is only superficial improvement; DMs are a flawed feature at a much lower level.
In descending order of interestingness and importance, here are a few things you may not know about Twitter DMs.
- All third party applications you authorize can read your DMs *
- Deleting a DM you’ve sent or received also deletes it from the other person’s account;
- Deleting DMs sends some Twitter clients into a confused frenzy;
- DMs don’t have a ‘reply to’ ID, so they can’t be threaded properly;
- The new Twitter interface only loads your most recent 100 messages;
- I’ve written a tool for backing up and deleting all your DMs – imaginatively titled DM Cleaner.
Read more…
Facebook Places rolled out to UK users today. This comes a month after the ‘global’ press launch a month ago. That’s the thing about the World Wide Web, people get disappointed when you say your product is only available in the US. But anyway it’s here now, so our tabloids can unleash the hounds, our social media experts can blog their hearts out, and I can finally find out where my ex-girlfriend gets her hair cut.
Please hold for media storm on privacy ..
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The four NYU students pledging to build Diaspora captured my imagination today, and I’m not the only one.
There is so much to discuss around this and it’s not even out of the lab yet. In a rare display of focus, I’ll devote my first post on the topic to one of the more obvious questions – Can they (or do they need to) get 400 million people to migrate away from Facebook? Read more…
Dear ordinary Facebook user. If you’re not a developer, or ‘social media guru’ you probably didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech last week; you probably haven’t read about the open graph protocol, and you probably haven’t tried out any of the new social plugins that Facebook have released. Because of this you may not be aware of some seemingly small changes that affect you more than you might think.
Here’s one: the ‘like’ button. This has become more than just a casual way to show your friends you think something is cool. It’s become more powerful for advertisers, more useful for Facebook, and for you … ? Read more…