heavenlyboy34
05-06-2012, 02:46 PM
Really long article (continued at the link), but worth showing to friends and family who insist on sharing personal info on FB.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-and-your-privacy.html?page=all
If you're reading this article, chances are good you have a page on Facebook, too. More than 150 million Americans already use the site, and the number grows daily because Facebook makes it so easy to keep up with friends, family, and colleagues, discover great content, connect to causes, share photos, drum up business, and learn about fun events.
To deliver this service, Facebook and other social networks collect enormous amounts of highly sensitive information—and distribute it more quickly and widely than traditional consumer data-gathering firms ever could. That’s great when it helps you find old classmates or see ads for things you actually want to buy. But how much information is really being collected about you? How is it being used? And could it fall into the wrong hands?
[Related: Facebook: A masterpiece and cultural catastrophe (http://yhoo.it/IHdMi1)]
To find out, we queried Facebook and interviewed some two dozen others, including security experts, privacy lawyers, app developers, and victims of security and privacy abuse. We dug into private, academic, and government research, as well as Facebook’s labyrinthian policies and controls. And we surveyed 2,002 online households, including 1,340 that are active on Facebook, for our annual State of the Net report. We then projected those data to estimate national totals.
The picture that emerges has bright spots but also many causes for concern, including the following:
Some people are sharing too much. Our projections suggest that 4.8 million people have used Facebook to say where they planned to go on a certain day (a potential tip-off for burglars) and that 4.7 million “liked” a Facebook page about health conditions or treatments (details an insurer might use against you).
Some don't use privacy controls. Almost 13 million users said they had never set, or didn’t know about, Facebook’s privacy tools. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just their friends.
Facebook collects more data than you may imagine. For example, did you know that Facebook gets a report every time you visit a site with a Facebook “Like” button, even if you never click the button, are not a Facebook user, or are not logged in?
Your data is shared more widely than you may wish. Even if you have restricted your information to be seen by friends only, a friend who is using a Facebook app could allow your data to be transferred to a third party without your knowledge.
Legal protections are spotty. U.S. online privacy laws are weaker than those of Europe and much of the world, so you have few federal rights to see and control most of the information that social networks collect about you.
And problems are on the rise. Eleven percent of households using Facebook said they had trouble last year, ranging from someone using their log-in without permission to being harassed or threatened. That projects to 7 million households—30 percent more than last year.
Some of these issues arise from poor choices users themselves make. But there is also evidence that people are treating Facebook more warily; 25 percent said they falsified information in their profiles to protect their identity, up from 10 percent two years ago. Other problems can stem from the ways Facebook collects data, how it manages and packages its privacy controls, and the fact that your data can wind up with people or companies with whom you didn’t intend to share it.
Andrew Noyes, Facebook's manager of public policy communications, says the company takes privacy and safety issues seriously. He pointed us to a blog posted last year by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote, “We do privacy access checks literally tens of billions of times each day to ensure we’re enforcing that only the people you want see your content.” And Facebook has made efforts to respond to concerns. Even as this article went to press, the company announced that it would offer users greater access to records of their past Facebook activity.
But some critics worry that the very existence of such a massive repository of personal data demands extraordinary protections and controls. “Last time I checked, large corporate interests aren’t allowed to trample on widely recognized fundamental rights just because their founders have invented some new, profitable privacy-busting product, yet that is exactly what has happened to privacy rights over the past few years,” charges James Steyer, founder of the children’s-advocacy group Common Sense Media and author of the book “Talking Back to Facebook.”
[Related: Hiding Money From Your Spouse Has Gotten a Lot Harder (http://yhoo.it/Iuia6O)]
In this article, we examine the gap between these two viewpoints to see where the truth lies. We focus on Facebook because it is the world’s largest social network, with 800-million-plus users, far more than competitors such as Google+ and LinkedIn. Facebook is also of interest because it has declared its intent to go public and is poised to raise billions more dollars in funding. What we found was sometimes fascinating and other times disquieting—but always worth knowing if you wish to keep your data under better control.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-and-your-privacy.html?page=all
If you're reading this article, chances are good you have a page on Facebook, too. More than 150 million Americans already use the site, and the number grows daily because Facebook makes it so easy to keep up with friends, family, and colleagues, discover great content, connect to causes, share photos, drum up business, and learn about fun events.
To deliver this service, Facebook and other social networks collect enormous amounts of highly sensitive information—and distribute it more quickly and widely than traditional consumer data-gathering firms ever could. That’s great when it helps you find old classmates or see ads for things you actually want to buy. But how much information is really being collected about you? How is it being used? And could it fall into the wrong hands?
[Related: Facebook: A masterpiece and cultural catastrophe (http://yhoo.it/IHdMi1)]
To find out, we queried Facebook and interviewed some two dozen others, including security experts, privacy lawyers, app developers, and victims of security and privacy abuse. We dug into private, academic, and government research, as well as Facebook’s labyrinthian policies and controls. And we surveyed 2,002 online households, including 1,340 that are active on Facebook, for our annual State of the Net report. We then projected those data to estimate national totals.
The picture that emerges has bright spots but also many causes for concern, including the following:
Some people are sharing too much. Our projections suggest that 4.8 million people have used Facebook to say where they planned to go on a certain day (a potential tip-off for burglars) and that 4.7 million “liked” a Facebook page about health conditions or treatments (details an insurer might use against you).
Some don't use privacy controls. Almost 13 million users said they had never set, or didn’t know about, Facebook’s privacy tools. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just their friends.
Facebook collects more data than you may imagine. For example, did you know that Facebook gets a report every time you visit a site with a Facebook “Like” button, even if you never click the button, are not a Facebook user, or are not logged in?
Your data is shared more widely than you may wish. Even if you have restricted your information to be seen by friends only, a friend who is using a Facebook app could allow your data to be transferred to a third party without your knowledge.
Legal protections are spotty. U.S. online privacy laws are weaker than those of Europe and much of the world, so you have few federal rights to see and control most of the information that social networks collect about you.
And problems are on the rise. Eleven percent of households using Facebook said they had trouble last year, ranging from someone using their log-in without permission to being harassed or threatened. That projects to 7 million households—30 percent more than last year.
Some of these issues arise from poor choices users themselves make. But there is also evidence that people are treating Facebook more warily; 25 percent said they falsified information in their profiles to protect their identity, up from 10 percent two years ago. Other problems can stem from the ways Facebook collects data, how it manages and packages its privacy controls, and the fact that your data can wind up with people or companies with whom you didn’t intend to share it.
Andrew Noyes, Facebook's manager of public policy communications, says the company takes privacy and safety issues seriously. He pointed us to a blog posted last year by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote, “We do privacy access checks literally tens of billions of times each day to ensure we’re enforcing that only the people you want see your content.” And Facebook has made efforts to respond to concerns. Even as this article went to press, the company announced that it would offer users greater access to records of their past Facebook activity.
But some critics worry that the very existence of such a massive repository of personal data demands extraordinary protections and controls. “Last time I checked, large corporate interests aren’t allowed to trample on widely recognized fundamental rights just because their founders have invented some new, profitable privacy-busting product, yet that is exactly what has happened to privacy rights over the past few years,” charges James Steyer, founder of the children’s-advocacy group Common Sense Media and author of the book “Talking Back to Facebook.”
[Related: Hiding Money From Your Spouse Has Gotten a Lot Harder (http://yhoo.it/Iuia6O)]
In this article, we examine the gap between these two viewpoints to see where the truth lies. We focus on Facebook because it is the world’s largest social network, with 800-million-plus users, far more than competitors such as Google+ and LinkedIn. Facebook is also of interest because it has declared its intent to go public and is poised to raise billions more dollars in funding. What we found was sometimes fascinating and other times disquieting—but always worth knowing if you wish to keep your data under better control.