facebook is so uncool
More and more people are now turning away from facebook, they are sick of being abused for profit and seeing their personal privacy violated for greed.
Marc Zuckerberg has become the one person most people would rather not be seen dead with.
Zuckerberg spat with Schweitzer
You have to laugh when facebook founder complains a private facebook photo made public.
Randi Zuckerberg — older sister to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — posted a photo from a family gathering to Facebook (of course), showing her sisters using Facebook’s new Snapchat-esque ’Poke’ app on their phones, with Mark Zuckerberg watching with a confused look on his face. It popped up on the Facebook newsfeed of mediaite Callie Schweitzer who subscribes to Zuckerberg. Assuming the photo was a public one, Schweitzer tweeted it to her nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Zuckerberg was not pleased.
How did this happen?
Facebook has once again changed privacy settings. The picture got out due to tagging.
Tagging is a violation of privacy, people may not wish to be tagged in a photo.
Rather than faulting facebook for what it does best, violating personal privacy, Randi Zuckerberg had the gall to blame Schweitzer. She tweeted:
Always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings. It’s about human decency.
It makes you want to throw up, a member of the Zuckerberg family tweeting to others about respecting privacy and human decency when the entire facebook business model is built around violating personal privacy. When facebook is only too happy to sell your personal data and everything you do.
Earlier this month Instagram (owned by facebook) changed their terms and conditions. Your photos would be sold to advertisers, you would not even be told about, let alone paid.
Pot calling the kettle black!
It would appear to be OK to violate the privacy of facebook users, but not if their name is Zuckerberg
A dramatic shift in Instagram’s privacy policy means the company can now sell your photographs and use your images in adverts – without payment or notification.
Instagram has claimed the right use any picture uploaded to the service to promote its corporate customers’ products without any compensation to the user who originally took it.
Instagram violates users with terms and conditions
I want to delete my Instagram account
Goodbye Instagram, you won’t be missed!
There are many brands that use Instagram right now to try to get a feel for how to engage with their followers. We will definitely be figuring out a monetisation strategy. When that will happen, I can’t comment, but it’s going to happen. — Carolyn Everson, Facebook vice president of global marketing
For Facebook, this is a case study in how to waste a billion dollars. The company bought a popular service, set about stripping it of what made it successful, and paved the way for the inevitable replacement. — Forbes
Having declared war on twitter, Instagram is now violating its users.
I have never understood why anyone uses Instagram. It is a rubbish application that turns good pictures bad. If you wish to process images, then use a software package like Paintshop Pro or Photoshop.
Facebook paid a ludicrous price for Instagram, far, far more than it was worth, for a trivial application that a couple of half decent software engineers could knock out in a few days. Facebook paid a high price because it was not the application facebook was buying, it was the user database. That gives an inkling of what your personal data is worth to facebook, a company that does not recognise personal privacy.
Following a stock market flotation, with shares going into free fall, facebook has been under growing pressure to milk its assets. Its assets is you!
Milk is the operative word. Users are being herded like cattle.
Once Instagram was acquired by facebook, it was obvious abuse of personal data was going to take place. The only surprise, is that it has not happened sooner.
Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch:
People thought they were Instagram’s customers, but in reality users are Instagram’s product. It goes to show when respecting people’s data and privacy come into conflict with profit, there’s only ever going to be one winner. Users are now paying the price of Facebook’s acquisition of the company and unfortunately this kind of move will be seen time and time again as long as it is our personal data and advertising paying for services.
Last week, users found posting their Instagram pictures to twitter no longer worked. One good thing, I guess, fewer rubbish photos posted to twitter.
From 16 January 2013, new terms and conditions will be imposed on users. No choice, you are opted in by Instagram. The only way to opt out is to delete your Instagram account, but first delete all the information held, including all you pictures.
The new terms and condition are a serious breach of personal privacy, and quite possibly a breach of data protection across Europe. Users used Instagram to share with their friends, not to share with unknown third parties.
Basically in a nutshell, your pictures, personal information, can be shared with third parties, your pictures used in adversing campaigns.
Instagram can share information about its users with Facebook, its parent company, as well as outside affiliates and advertisers
All your personal information, including photos, is for sale.
You could star in an advertisement — without your knowledge
Your pictures, including of you or your friends, can be used in advertising campaigns. Let us say you hate McDonald’s, do not like Starbucks coffee or their tax dodging, how would you then feel to find they are using your photos to promote their products, how would your friends feel if pictures of them are used? And they can use your name. And you do not get paid, or even notified.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that the use of a person’s likeness in ads could run into some state laws protecting personal privacy.
Most states have laws that limit the use of a person’s ‘name or likeness’ for commercial purposes without consent. The legal purpose is to allow people to obtain the commercial value of their images and endorsements, which is a big issue for celebrities and others, but also a reasonable concern for Facebook users whose images are used by Facebook to encourage friends to buy products and services.
Underage users are not exempt
Would you be happy to find pictures of your kids are being used?
Ads may not be labeled as ads
It gets worse. We usually know ads are ads. But what if they are not obviously ads?
You acknowledge that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such.
Want to opt out? Delete your account!
Do not like? Tough, you are automatically opted in. The only way to opt out is to delete your account. If you remain, you are deemed to have agreed to violation of your personal privacy.
This is like a rape victim being deemed to be a willing participant to rape because she did not scream out.
Instagram also reserves the right to share any cookie derived data with third parties.
The choice is yours. You do not have to be a willing victim to what amounts to rape of your personal data by Instagram. You can delete your account. And that is the recommended course of action.
Prior to deleting your account, you may wish to download all your pictures held on Instagram using Instaport (sign in with your Instagram account).
There are alternatives. You can upload direct to twitter, you can upload to twitpic (which will automatically post to twitter). Or try Snapseed.
If you know Instagram users (they are the ones who send out bad pictures), then please warn them and advise to delete their Instagram accounts. Even if they do not care about abuse by Instagram, make it clear you do (as they may be holding information, pictures, relating to you).
When you delete your Instagram account please advise all your followers on twitter with the hashtag #BoycottInstagram and tell them why.
Instagram may have been one of the fastest growing companies on the net. Let’s see how quickly we can kill it.
As Winston Smith learnt to his cost, Big Brother was monitoring everything he did.
CCTV watches and tracks, face recognition picks you out. GPS pinpoints where you are. Mobile phone networks track where you are, who you are communicating with. Credit and debit cards track where you are, how much you are spending. Store cards track where you are, build a profile of what you buy, where and when.
Facebook apps monitor everything you are doing on facebook, and know who all your friends are.
How many people are aware that their e-book reader is not only monitoring what they read but even gathering fine data such as which passages in a book you may have highlighted, passages that you may pause and reflect upon?
It is one thing to tweet what you are reading, to write a review, even to contact the author with your thoughts on a book, but it is an entirely different matter invasive monitoring of what we read.
Philip Jones editor of The Bookseller (a vested interest if ever there was one), dismisses concerns. Clearly he has no understanding of data mining. Author Joan Brady on the other hand is very concerned at this invasion of privacy, what your e-book reader is reading about you and what the information gathered is being used for.
What are authors doing about this? Are they happy with the privacy of their readers being violated?
Maybe we should all go back to reading real books, books you hold in your hand, and when we buy books do so with cash from a secondhand bookshop.
Facebook e-mail account
A couple of weeks ago I seemed to acquire a facebook e-mail account. I have never asked for one, do not desire one, but when it comes to facebook, what does it matter what I or any other of their users think?
I looked for it this evening. I had to delve into settings to find it. At first I thought it had come and gone, but no, there is was, buried under secondary e-mail address in my e-mail settings.
Whilst I was rooting around, I thought I would check facebook apps. I have never signed up for any facebook apps, and yet there was half a dozen facebook apps. Some seemed to be sites I had visited, eg New York Times, but others I had never heard of eg Cities I have Visited.
Check out your face book apps. More important check out what they have access to.
Never use facebook apps. They have access to all your personal data. Do you know where it is going, who has access to that information? Do you even know who is behind the facebook apps?
If you are on spotify, it broadcasts what you are doing to everyone on facebook. It pays artists a pittance. Do not use spotify.
Delete all your facebook apps.
Do not use facebook to sign in to other sites. Do you wish the sites to share data on you?
Delete all personal information on facebook. Would you give it to a stranger in the street? If no, then why do you hand it to the world via facebook?
But if you delete personal data on facebook, it still exists in their archives. I suggest therefore you overwrite with false data first, then delete.
Being given an e-mail address by facebook seems innocuous enough, but nothing facebook does is innocuous.
There has been a storm of protest. Those who have their phones synched to facebook, have had their address books rewritten, facebook has hijacked their e-mail address and replaced with a facebook e-mail address, e-mails have gone missing.
Have I lost e-mails? I do not know, and that is the problem. How do you know you have lost something you never knew you had?
Rachel Luxemburg writes:
Today, a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work e-mail address with my Facebook e-mail address. He discovered this only after sending work e-mails to the wrong address.
And even worse, the e-mails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked.
They’ve vanished into the ether.
For all I know, I could be missing a lot more e-mails from friends, colleagues, or family members, and never even know it.
On Hacker News:
This morning my mother was complaining that many of the e-mail addresses in her Droid Razr contacts had been replaced with Facebook ones.
It would seem the Facebook app had been populating her address book with e-mails and contact photos, and decided to migrate all her Facebook-using contacts over to this convenient new system.
On Slashdot:
I sync my phone with Facebook for many of my contacts. Now I have an address book full of bogus e-mail addresses where they were correct before.
And just when you think this cannot get worse, Apple have kindly integrated their operating system with facebook so your address book gets updated without you even being notified!
On HN:
Crap thing changed the primary e-mail address of the contacts in my iPhone iOS 6.
This cannot be overstated: e-mail is being intercepted and goes who knows where!
Let us get this straight: Wikileaks hands to the public information on Big Government and Big Business and they are a bunch of criminals with Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuador Embassy in London fearing extradition to the US. Facebook hands your personal information to corporate criminals and the company gets a ridiculous overinflated valuation on Wall Street.
When something is free, always remember you are the product on sale.
Top Story in Ediscovery and DataProtection Daily (Monday 2 July 2012).
