geekosystem

There's been an increasing and disturbing trend lately; employers and college admissions officers -- unable to glean as much information as they used to from social networks now that more and more individuals are utilizing their privacy settings -- have been asking applicants for their Facebook credentials, log on in front of them or give a supervisor "friends only" access. They want to be able to check out your account and look around from the the inside. Naturally there are some questions as to whether or not this is appropriate, and Facebook has decided to weigh in on the matter. Employers shouldn't be asking for this kind of access, the social media giant says, and applicants shouldn't be giving it to them. And it's not just for the applicant's benefit.

Facebook is notorious for wanting to keep its hooks in you. You'd be hard pressed to get Facebook to delete the media and information it already has about you, and likewise, while you can "deactivate" your account, you can't "delete" it. In fact, you can deactivate and reactivate you account on a whim as many times and as often as you please. That may sound useful, or even convenient, to those of you out there who are both impulsive and indecisive. This ability can be dangerous however; account deactivation can be used to spy on other Facebook accounts from the shadows by using accounts that don't appear to actually exist.

Facebook users have started to get more and more concerned about the privacy of their personal data recently. Non-Facebook users might start getting worried as well. A recently filed complaint from Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner alleges that Facebook purposely uses covert methods to coax Facebook users into handing over information about their non-member friends and then hoards that information, creating dossiers on non-users.

The complaint alleges that mechanisms like syncing phone books and email contact lists, sending invitations, and even search queries are being used by Facebook to not only collect and store information about non-members, but to con members into handing it over frequently and in quantity. As "proof" the complain points out that often, non-users will get invitations listing people whom they know in real life. This kind of information, the complaint suggests, could be being used for less than legal purposes.

If the frictionless (read: permission-less) sharing involved with the new Facebook Timeline weirds you out a little, blogger Nik Cubrilovic has some more unsettling news for you. As it turns out, Facebook has cookies that will track the website you go to for its own purposes in addition to purposes that could arguably be for "sharing." If you log out, the cookies are not deleted, but instead modified and will still able to track letting Facebook keep an eye on the websites you visit.

Cubrilovic had been working on a project involving fake Facebook accounts when he was tipped off to the situation. Despite the fact that his fake Facebook accounts were unconnected to his real account and that none of them were ever signed in simultaneously, Facebook started listing his real account as a suggested friend for his fake accounts. Facebook was keeping track of who was logging in and from where.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that many Facebook applications are sharing users' personal information in violation of the company's privacy policy. According to Facebook's terms of service, apps cannot transmit users' personal IDs, the unique strings numbers assigned to every user, with which a simple Google search can determine the identity even of someone with the strictest privacy settings. But many of Facebook's 550,000 apps, including all ten of the top ten apps, are doing this anyway, covertly giving access to "people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies." Update: Many people hate this WSJ article and think it is dumb.

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt. It delved into a number of things like the Verizon deal and Schmidt's excitement for Minority Report-style "targeted advertisement," but the folks at the Telegraph noticed a truly interesting quote nestled unto the discussion. Schmidt apparently believes that, as time goes on and we reach a point where every single person has embarrassing information and pictures from their adolescence posted on social media sites online, it will become commonplace for people to automatically change their name once they reach adulthood.

Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, held a press conference at 1:30pm EDT today announcing the big changes for Facebook's privacy settings. A lot of the changes are much-needed fixes, but while this is a big step forward, the work isn't quite done. Here's a breakdown of what you should know about these changes and how they'll affect your Facebook experience.

Facebook has yet to release the new, simplified privacy settings that Mark Zuckerberg alluded to in his Washington Post op-ed column, but Facebook VP Chris Cox assured us all that they'll be coming at some point today.

We're a little skeptical, but we'll have to wait and see: In the mean time, let's hope they're not as bad as the good, cynical people of The Joy of Tech imagine them to be. Option 1 sounds pretty nice though, doesn't it?

Read the fine print at The Joy of Tech.

Betty White's highly anticipated stint as the host of Saturday Night Live aired last night, and the lovely young lady had some thanks for the community that put here there: Facebook.

But I really have to thank Facebook. When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host Saturday Night Live I didn't know what Facebook was. And now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers. But that's only because I'm polite.

It's uh, much more funny and endearing when she says it. Video from the folks at Mediaite after the jump.

Just as many threatened to burn their U.S. passports and move to Canada if George W. Bush won the 2004 presidential election, but few followed through when he did, so has been the anti-Facebook backlash: Though every successive wave of privacy-eroding, profit-maximizing innovations prompts lots of threats to quit, deactivate, and delete, not very many people cling to principle at the cost of losing the well-established network of their friends. And there's a weird social cache to being tech-savvy and Doctorovian enough to be, like, pissed off about it: As reporter David Montgomery recently wrote on Twitter, "Complaining about Facebook privacy has joined fixed-gear bikes and ironic facial hair as a hipster trademark." But this afternoon, about as noteworthy a tech media figure as you can find -- Peter Rojas, the founding editor of Gizmodo, Engadget, and gdgt -- announced on Twitter that he was deactivating his Facebook account, prompting a flurry of retweets, baffled replies, and shows of support. Moments later, investor and Infectious Greed writer Paul Kedrosky did the same. Is the great wave of Facebook deactivation, prompted by the ruthless march towards unhideable social metadata inherent in the recently unveiled Facebook Open graph, upon us?

Yesterday I joked that we had a new anti-Facebook story every day but, well, it's barely a joke at this point. For any of you who noticed that the Facebook chat function was down this morning, it's because someone figured out that a flaw in Facebook's privacy settings would enable you to view the live chats of your friends. Oops, that's not good.

Sometimes it seems like every day that goes by ends with at least one story showing Facebook continuing its descent from "awesome website for college kids" to "incredibly frightening Orwellian nightmare." Today's involves a court case in which Facebook is suing a website that allows users to log into all of their social media profiles at one time. Facebook doesn't like the idea of people accessing their profiles through a means not run by them so they're claiming that Power Ventures is making a criminal violation by violating Facebook terms of service. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation just sent out a press release arguing that, if Facebook's lawsuit goes through, they would be able to prosecute any Facebook user who used Power Ventures and make them a criminal for looking at their own profile!

With the recent launch of Twitter's Geolocation API, every social startup worth its rackspace has been moving in the direction of locational applications. Now, Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider seems to have inside confirmation that Facebook is working on adding capabilities for "checking into" to physical locations through its mobile service. Will parents soon know every time a college freshman hits up a frat party? Will your boss question your frequent trips to the free clinic? Will your significant other notice your repeated, um, "visits" to their best friend's apartment?