Facebook : Security Glitch and Secretly Added Apps
On one side, I feel like I am harping quite a bit on this subject and it might perceived as a bit of a crusade against Facebook. And yet, this is an important subject for anyone with an online presence to be aware of and so I continue reading articles on it and posting my own thoughts.
Further evidence that your Facebook profile and information are not truly under your control: New Facebook Social Features Secretly Add Apps to Your Profile. Visit a site while still logged into Facebook and an application for that site might be automatically added to your user account without your permission. No way of opting out of this feature either, unsurprisingly. The article suggests that one needs to be logged into Facebook for this to happen, but I would not place any guarantee on logging out of Facebook as preventing this kind of abuse. Every few days I have been checking my browser’s cookies and there are always four to six .facebook.com cookies in there. I delete them and check again a couple days later and new cookies are there. One of the sites I visit on a regular basis are using Facebook for a feature and this feature is adding cookies. Even when you are not logged on, Facebook may be keeping track of the sites you are visiting and will probably check for those cookies once you log back in to Facebook.com.
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Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries.
On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.
I particularly enjoyed this bit:
The extent of the discontent among users is hard to quantify, but one measure is a group created on Facebook to protest the recent changes, which has attracted more than 2.2 million members.
Mr. Schrage said that the company was aware that some users were not happy with the changes, but that the overall response had been positive.
Granted, 2.2 million is a paltry half a percent of Facebook’s user base, but that is still quite a lot of people unhappy with the state of privacy on Facebook. And, if you trust a Consumer Reports survey, many people don’t quite understand the implications of Facebook’s attempts to undermine our privacy for their own business interests. It is not about how people respond or don’t respond or even about what they understand, it is about the right way to treat people and their information when they give you their trust.