Facebook's creepy privacy

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/facebooks-creepy-privacy.html

by jgrahamc • 17 years ago

44 27 17 years ago

tome• 17 years ago

I agree that this is appalling behaviour from Facebook, but how anyone could give a third party website access to their Google Mail account is beyond me.

joubert• 17 years ago

The economics of trust.

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

That wasn't hard. I just changed my Google Mail password temporarily while Facebook needed access.

bumblebird• 17 years ago

Allowing anyone access to your email account, even temporarily, seems like the problem here. I just wouldn't do it. Ever.

elai• 17 years ago

Google has an api for such situations as these (I think), so I don't think facebook actually gets your credentials.

txxxxd• 17 years ago

This isn't just any third-party site though - it's Facebook, the company people already entrust with their personal/private data.

I think this situation is like giving a friend your house keys while on vacation. You'd expect your friend to feed the dog, water the plants, and then lock up. Facebook is the friend that also takes the opportunity to rifle through your desk.

scrame• 17 years ago

I had a friend sign up recently, and didn't realize what was happening, he thought it was that gmail and facebook were working together. That surprised him, but not as much as me explaining that he had effectively just been phished.

cake• 17 years ago

I'm quite impressed by Facebook's friends suggestions, I discovered a lot of friends thanks to it.

I'm not sure he received this suggestions solely on his emails contacts as I haven't allowed Facebook to access my email contacts and I could find most of them in my suggestions anyway.

I suspect that they also log when you view someone's profile and use this metric to offer better recommendations.

Anyone know more about how it works and what data they use ?

potatolicious• 17 years ago

I'm perfectly with fine with Facebook recommending new friends based on their social graph - it's an entire other story when this involves snooping through people's emails.

tcskeptic• 17 years ago

"I'm guessing that what happened here is that these people have my email address in their address book."

I don't think this is necessarily true. In my experience most of these suggestions have come from friend-of-friend commonality. For example, two of the people you are friends with on Facebook are also friends with these people, so Facebook thinks you know them. Even if your thoughts on what happened in this case are correct, this kind of connection making, social graph building utilities if you will, are so fundamental to the purpose of Facebook that your objection seems odd to me. This kind of stuff is exactly why many people join.

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

I would think you were right if it were not for the fact that the email was sent to an email address that I have not registered with Facebook. That means that they can't have identified my Facebook profile and must have been going off on the presence the email address used in the address books of those people in the email.

ori_b• 17 years ago

No, Facebook definitely looks into email addresses from address books to make suggestions. I know because Facebook has made suggestions of people I have no common friend-of-friends with.

The only interaction I had with them was via email (mostly for work-related questions).

loup-vaillant• 17 years ago

Even then, if you can reach the transitive closure of your friends, (and vice versa), then your profile is just as public as a personal web page. Unfortunately, Facebook strongly suggests otherwise (you are supposed to connect with "friends", and external links arbour big warnings flags about privacy on the scary open web). I think this mere mismatch is creepy by itself.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

I've always assumed that a part of what Import your friends from your email! did was exactly what you describe - try to invite the non-Facebook users in your address book to Facebook.

This is one of the reasons why I would have never thought of trying to import my email account's address book.

prabodh• 17 years ago

Facebook allows me to see pictures of people who are not in my friend list, but which are commented by any of my friends...I can their complete album even if only one pic is commented by any of my friends...How is that for privacy ? Any thing more private than your pics...

ivenkys• 17 years ago

This is very true - i am very surprised that people don;t find this creepy. This is the reason i came out of FB.

scott_s• 17 years ago

Repeat after me: there is no privacy on the internet. Everything you do or say is public. Act accordingly.

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

That's a setting, you can change it. If you don't check the defaults it's your own fault.

socratees• 17 years ago

I just feel kind of irritated with this "People who you may know" feature. Especially on Facebook and LinkedIn.

raintrees• 17 years ago

A colleague of mine pretty much came unglued when LinkedIn came up with friend links he did not supply (he had not used the address book surfing feature). He actually contacted a rep and had a back and forth argument: "You opened my address book without my permission," "No, we did not."

I'm fairly sure that people are not thinking through the ramifications of giving _anyone_ else _any_ data online. This seems to be a similar learning curve as those who are finding their offline shenanigans haunting them later in online life.

And it seems quite a business opportunity to offer "reputation clean-up" services, maybe similar to the "credit clean-up" services existing now.

I am aware of an instance of a non-refundable charge of $1200.00 and the reply of "there is nothing we can do in your case."

youngian• 17 years ago

I refused to get on FB for years because their privacy policy was so awful (I eventually relented). It's always been one of the worst privacy policies around, which is saying something.

I don't want to be the pedant who says "you should have read the privacy policy before you signed up," but you should just assume that any site like this is going to do all sorts of shady things with any information you provide, until you find evidence to the contrary. This kind of paranoia is absolutely called for on the web.

psranga• 17 years ago

You forgot to double-highlight the bare "including", which automatically implies "including but not limited to".

Yep, unexpected. That's why I don't ever take up websites' offer to parse my address book.

staticshock• 17 years ago

Truth be told, you loved Porky's Revenge, but you'd prefer that your five-star rating stay between you and Netflix. But those situations are rare and getting rarer.

I'm sorry? Are situations requiring privacy getting rarer? I hope you can back that up with some kind of numbers, Slate.

Facebook's creepy privacy

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