Fear And Loathing At The Wall Street Journal | Hacker News Reader

Fear And Loathing At The Wall Street Journal

techcrunch.com

28 pointsbond9 comments

Worth noting that this article wasn't an attack on Facebook necessarily. WSJ has been running a series of stories on privacy issues for weeks now, this is just the latest story. I've read many of the articles and I have to agree with most of what they have written - many companies are in fact finding, scraping, selling and otherwise moving our personal information across the web.

The bigger question is how much should we care? I really don't care if 'X' company knows that I like baseball. But I do mind if someone gets my credit card information and uses it to make purchases - someone just spent $1k on iTunes on my credit card. I'm disputing it with Apple and my bank right now - argh.

I mostly respect the WSJ but I would certainly not put it past them to protect, or at least ignore a sister company like MySpace. When a lot of the right leaning media was questioning the storyline and motives of the left leaning Avatar movie, the WSJ was nowhere to be found. No surprise that News Corp owns the studio that produced Avatar.

Wait, isn't the uproar because keeping/transmitting this data is supposed to be against Facebook's ToS?

Doesn't an app have keep something to identify it's users if it is going have users on Facebook?

Myspace is a sister company to the WSJ? In theory maybe, but I am sure many folks at the Journal consider Myspace like that strange step-sister you'd rather not talk about.

I really don't see Myspace as much if a competitor to FB anymore, either.

What matters though is what the person signing the editors pay check thinks about myspace!

Thats the danger with print journalism. If you see a Fox news story that Obama easts babies you can pretty much guess the impartiality of the source.

If you read a tech story about Blue-ray not being very good do you know if the paper's parent company owns a study that is backing HD-DVD?

"Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user's friends to outside companies."

Michael Arrington is no Hunter S. Thompson..

I feel dumber after reading that 'article'. Brushing off information gleaned through referrers because it's a 'web-wide problem' is a cop-off. It's trivial to fix and Facebook will be forced to do it because of the WSJ article.

Dragging Myspace into this is nothing but a red-herring. The leak itself is proper news. I am sure Techcrunch can expose any privacy flaws in Myspace if they find some. Not sure that anyone cares about Myspace at this point though.

Well,

Leak or not, what the Journal is complaining about isn't happening within Facebook at all but rather between Facebook applications and online tracking companies. And that thing is that the applications are transmitting data without "anonymizing" it properly. And as I recall, the problem of "really" "anonymizing" data is not easy at all.

Another way to put it is "anonymizing" is a fairy tale, users shouldn't really don't expect it really happen and should instead protect their own privacy - at least to the extent of not revealing personally identifying when it's not necessary (though I guess there is a human urge to publish one's address and when one is away from home).

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