David Fraser points out that the year Facebook said it needed to address privacy issues raised by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner is over, and there is speculation that the Commissioner may not be satisfied. It will indeed be interesting to see how this shakes out. Frankly, the things that Facebook does from time to time [...]
Control of private information on social networking sites has recently come to the forefront due to members unintentionally making their personal information available to strangers, with the potential to cause embarrassment to themselves and detriment to their career. Facebook changed…
BitTorrent is the ideal way to transfer large files to thousands of locations in a short period of time. This doesn’t only apply to movies and music that are downloaded by the average BitTorrent user, companies can benefit from it as well. With help from BitTorrent, Facebook can now push hundreds of megabytes of new code to all servers worldwide in just a minute.
For the London Free Press – June 21, 2010 Read this on Canoe Many people are not concerned about their privacy on Facebook – but they should be. Facebook’s recent changes are a good lesson in how not to make changes that affect or control privacy.On April 21, 2010, at a Facebook developers’ conference called [...]
My colleague Ian Kerr published a terrific op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen over the weekend addressing Facebook, privacy, and the importance of focusing on the defaults used by the social networking giant.
Clear v. Superior Court, 2010 WL 2029016 (Cal.App. 4 Dist. May 24, 2010) The California Court of Appeal has held that a man who set up a bogus MySpace profile of his former church pastor can stand trial for criminal “personation.” The defendant’s alleged conduct that might really put him on the hook is what [...]
Facebook has asked a Quebec court to enforce an $843 million spam judgment it obtained in a California court against Montreal's Adam Guerbuez.
I have a piece in today’s NY Times “Room for Debate” feature, on whether the government should regulate Facebook. In writing the piece, I was looking for a pithy way to express the problems with today’s notice-and-consent model for online privacy. After some thought, I settled on “privacy theater”.
Bruce Schneier has popularized the term “security theater,” denoting security measures that look impressive but don’t actually protect us—they create the appearance of security but not the reality. When a security guard asks to see your ID but doesn’t do more than glance at it, that’s security theater. Much of what happens at airport checkpoints is security theater too.
Privacy theater is the same concept, applied to privacy. Facebook’s privacy policy runs to almost 6000 words of dense legalese. We are all supposed to have read it and agreed to accept its terms. But that’s just theater. Hardly any of us have actually read privacy policies, and even fewer consider carefully their provisions. As I wrote in the Times piece, we pretend to have read sites’ privacy policies, and the sites pretend that we have understood and consented to all of their terms. It’s privacy theater.
Worse yet. privacy policies are subject to change. When sites change their policies, we get another round of privacy theater, in which sites pretend to notify us of the changes, and we pretend to consider them before continuing our use of the site.
And yet, if we’re going to replace the notice-and-consent model, we need something else to put in its place. At this point, It’s hard to see what that might be. It might help to set up default rules, on the theory that a policy that states how it differs from the default might be shorter and simpler than a stand-alone policy, but that approach will only go so far.
In the end, we may be stuck with privacy theater, just as we’re often stuck with security theater. If we can’t provide the reality of privacy or security, we can settle for theater, which at least makes us feel a bit better about our vulnerability.
In common with many websites, several torrent sites have their own Facebook fan pages that are used to interact with users. These pages usually update fans on site news and do not link to torrent files. Despite this, Facebook does not seem tolerant of all torrent site fan pages, and has just removed one of the popular ones.
The Financial Times reports that European data protection officials have written a letter to Facebook arguing that its December changes to user default settings were "unacceptable."