Interesting read for users of Facebook and privacy concerns

I don't know if people on this forum have read or heard about the privacy issues concerning Facebook. Here are two articles if you want to read about some of it:

Contrite Facebook CEO promises new privacy controls - Yahoo! News

Facebook, MySpace caught releasing user data - Yahoo! News

One particularly interesting statement from the article is this:

But Zuckerberg (creator of Facebook) is also being dogged by an embarrassing IM thread from when he was a 19-year-old Harvard student, bragging that he'd gathered personal information from thousands of users for the nascent TheFacebook.com. "People just submitted it," Zuckerberg messaged, "I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb [expletive]."

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Thanks for the read!

Here's this from Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/5546160/facebook-ceo-admits-they-missed-the-mark-on-privacy

thanks for sharing

I have to admin, I'm on the verge of killing off my FB account. I've reconnected with a lot of old friends through it, but these things are worrying to me. Even more worrying is the fact that I experienced quite a strange anomaly changing security settings in FB a few weeks ago.

I made changes, applied them and later went back into the settings and found that they had reverted to defaults. I switched over to Safari and made the same changes and this time they stuck, but it was still concerning to me that FB would do that with a mainstream browser like Firefox.

So, I guess the moral of the story is - if you're a FB user and you've made any changes from the default security settings, give it a double-check and make sure they're actually applied. Clearly quality control for this aspect of FB is lacking to some degree.

Even if you change your privacy settings, when FB changes their website privacy settings/policy it resets some of your settings back to public. You have to once again change them or risk having some of your information exposed to the worldwide web.

You are not the only one thinking about killing off their FB accounts. Many people have already and many others are planning to. I don't know if people here know who Leo Laporte is but he's a big name in the computer tech industry. Anyway he has already deleted his account because he doesn't want to support FB nor does he want his friends and audience to continue to use it.

The scariest thing is that there are still a large percentage of FB users that are not aware of what is going on which is why I posted those articles. Everyone is going to have to make the decision for themselves but they should at least be aware of what is going on.

edited to add: It looks the FB privacy issue will become mainstream news. It's going to be on the cover of Time Magazine: Facebook Privacy Makes The Cover of Time Magazine

Good Read!

Thanks for the read! Good Stuff.

I have been following Facebook's handling of personal data for a long time and somehow I got the impression that something was being done about it .... that things were improving.
I was proven to be wrong and based on the ( legal ) risks that facebook is posing to our company, we decided to revoke access for all our employees and visitors.

For facebook, data privacy just isn't part of their business model, I am tempted to say they don't care ..... or they don't have the skills nor the methodology to address this properly.

Personnaly, I will close down facebook as soon as I have informed all my contacts, which will be by end of this week.

Cheers ... McBie