The Geek Professor » Blogging

Facebook Sacrifices Its Users to Greed

Jeremy — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:29:07 +0000

Facebook has been caught with a seriously nasty tracking and monitoring program that it's unleashed upon it's users. Their new ad software broadcasts your current activities to your facebook friends. If you just bought a ticket to a concert, your friends might see an alert to that effect. If you just bought medication for your embarassing personal issue, they might see that too. But it gets worse:

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

(H/T to slashdot for the link)

Update:

There's a simple way to block Facebook's tracking using a plugin for Firefox. (H/T to The Consumerist for the link).

Parents Embarassed or Worse For What their Kids Post Online

Jeremy — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:52:10 +0000

Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn’t considered the effect on the parents.

“Whether we’re talking about dad’s work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship,” Sgt. MacDonald said.

We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn’t take long.

“Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics,” reads Sgt. MacDonald.

He says it’s not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles.

While drugs and underage drinking are likely problems that should be dealt with, some other things should remain private:

even innocent-sounding news can do damage. “They may be talking about how their father is losing a job, and perhaps a neighbor who’s the mortgage broker for the father isn’t aware that the father’s job is in jeopardy,”

Parents Can Get Fired For What their Kids Post Online

Jeremy — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:37:09 +0000

Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn't considered the effect on the parents.

"Whether we're talking about dad's work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship," Sgt. MacDonald said. We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn't take long. "Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics," reads Sgt. MacDonald. He says it's not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles

While those people might deserve to get fired (if the teen poster is telling the truth and not just venting), the article lists another example of a mortgage broker finding out that one of his customers lost his job. Privacy is starting to become harder and harder to protect, but also more important at the same time. (H/T to digg for the link)