Is it possible to opt out of social networking?
jonoscript.wordpress.com
jonoscript.wordpress.com
Internet social networks are like small town social networks where everyone knows who is doing what to whom, except that instead of a few hundred locals who like to gossip, the community is millions, and the motive is monitization.
As to his fear that they're associating friends by email addresses uploaded, my personal experience implies that they either don't, or it factors in very lightly. A few friends who I email with pretty regularly, and are on Facebook, and uploaded their email lists (which I am most certainly on) didn't come up as possible-friends ever. It seems to be entirely friend-of-a-friend based, and as they were in an entirely separate circle of friends, they never came up. I never bothered adding them, because we already contacted each other as needed through email / IM.
The friends it did suggest to me, though, were almost universally friends of my friends, typically with several connections, but I seriously doubt they ever had my email (or many of the in-between links, if any).
They do (or at least did) allow FB Connect using sites to check whether an existing e-mail address was associated with a facebook account via submitting a hashed copy (if memory serves, it's a plain md5 hash). Their developer site is down at the moment so I can't verify the exact mechanisms they (claimed) to be using to store e-mail addreses, and which e-mails they store, and what you can access through the Connect API.
In retrospect I wish I hadn't used it, as this article mentions, I not only gave away pieces of my personal information, I gave away personal information that didn't even belong to me, it belonged to my contacts. Now, it seems quite dubious that facebook has the gall to ask for my email password. It is true that hindsight it 20/20.
Thanks greatly for that link. Moglen is a great speaker and his idea of the "Freedom box" (personal servers where you own the logs) goes a long way, to paraphrase Moglen: to put "Zuc" into receivership.
When you make your data public, you no longer have a right to control it. The alternative is that by making your data public, you impose a burden of secrecy on those who hear you talking.
It's mildly creepy that facebook knows so much about you, but it's not a particularly new phenomenon. ("You must be Danny, Jo talks about you all the time! Tell me, did you really...") Facebook just hears more gossip than any one person did in the past.
Yet he offers an example in the article of Facebook prompting for the user's email account password, which, in my book, is insidiously evil. Sending sensitive emails to someone may not be wise, but it's hardly an example of making your data public. Facebook claims to be harvesting email addresses (which is bad enough), but the potential for abuse is enormous, considering that the company is dedicated to monetizing the private details of people's lives. Facebook shouldn't even ask for passwords, and this is one of the main reasons it's banned in our household.
How can anyone read your GMail contacts without your logging into your account?
If the utility of this tool is lost on you even though this password is clearly not stored anywhere, you can manually go out and find on-Facebook friends yourself.
Google (and others) provide an API for doing this specifically to prevent users entering their passwords into 3rd party sites...
1) GMail has an export to csv feature. Export your contacts.
2) Facebook creates a "import contacts" feature. Import the list.
Done.
I can't think of any right now, but you may be able to come up with a feature that absolutely needs you to put in your email password. However, I suspect that by adding a little inconvenience, one can find a way around it.
More is different.
At some point, a large enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. Facebook has definitely crossed that boundary. This does, in itself, make facebook bad, but its not just the equivalent of an absurdly gossipy person.
When you make your data public, you no longer have a right to control it.
Fair enough, but the problem is the rate at which your information becomes very public that is causing problems. In the past, if you sent someone a letter with a return address, they could make photocopies if it and send it to everyone they wanted to, but that would take a lot of time and effort. The fact that its almost automatic now will catch a lot of people by surprise. People need to understand how quickly information about them can spread so they can make informed decisions in their life.
At the same time, it must be remembered that facebook never forces anyone to share their personal information. You do have control over who sees what.
We've moved from file sharing "piracy" to personal information "piracy." And, ultimately, neither is preventable.
Sounds catchy but makes no sense at all. The two are not even related.
Also "personal information piracy" is a strange description of people giving out their information voluntarily. This can be trivially prevented by simply not typing that information into a website...
The whole point of the article was that it's not you giving the information out. Once it's out in the world, via your friends knowing it, you can't choose whether or not it gets entered. Tiny bits of periphery evidence end up being a lot of information about you.
They're sharing something of yours without your consent. That's what the term "piracy" is supposed to mean.