I agree that fb trades on member behaviour not altering default settings. While you could argue that privacy settings on fb are becoming fine-grained, it relies on the ordinary member to actively alter them. And that doesn’t take account of what happens to member data when it ‘leaks’… See Is Facebook Evil? privacy leaks, data flows and conspiracy theories

That’s why i’m not member of Facebook or any other Social Networking site. am i paranoid ?

This gives any average hacker (or unscrupulous site owner) enormous power to exploit these accounts and the information they might contain.

For people who work in large organisations, email addresses and IP addresses are not usually shielded while browsing (silly, I know).

But even for those who adopt some level of obfuscation are kidding themselves if they think they are safe.

Despite comments above, they don’t need your email address. It is only sufficient that you have a current session open (read: are logged in) with any of the above providers for someone to access that information through a beacon.

Beware the “Remember me” checkbox!

He believed that we create a social contract when we form a community/society, whereby we cede certain natural rights to an authority in return for security and other guarantees.

Locke’s argument is that any fair social contract must have certain qualities: It must respect its citizens rights to life, liberty, and property. If these rights are violated, we are entitled to rebel against the authority.

These rebellions have happened in the past at Digg and Facebook when they added functionality that was perceived to be in violation of user’s expected rights.

Facebook is a free service so we can assume some give & take in the relationship with its users. The pill has been sweetened with the the clever social design that masks what is going.

In the grand scheme of things, is facebook being evil or simply getting a little ROI from the social contract? They’ve held up their part of the deal, now we need to start paying (o;

Imagine the following scenario: I have a facebook profile, the cookie is stored on my PC. The next day my wife goes online and purchases some lingerie and the 3rd party sends that purchase information to facebook. Except my wife doesn’t have a facebook account and it appears on my profile. It then appears that I’ve been purchasing lingerie to all my facebook friends and colleagues.

Of course this is just one example. Surely it must be also using a common email address to avoid this shared computer/multiple facebook account families and so surely the obvious answer is to use a difference email address for facebook?

I think you could spend a few weeks chunking this one up into digestable pieces.

Thanks again for another great post. I’ve been following the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, from SocialAds to emoployees accessing user profiles, on the blogosphere. I’m curious as to why this hasn’t really bubbled up in to the mainstream media. They seem to be the teflon social network.

But why?

I have a feeling that is has a lot to do with Facebook being the social network your friendly dictator would love you to be a member of. The casually forced transparency is chillingly similar to communist regimes of the cold war era where nothing went unoticed by the leaders or your friends or your neighbors. I’d hate to see the point where *not* having a Facebook is an indicator that you must have somethig to hide.

ok i’ll admit that sounds kooky, maybe i should put down my kundera and kosinsky