http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=122212854462445&ref=ts

The initial goal is to rally enough support to have a rule added to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the Privacy Policy disallowing anything PRIVATE from ever being made PUBLIC. Furthermore, if there were a precise way to word it, Privacy settings of any kind shall never be automatically converted to a more “open/public” setting without the user’s explicit consent or without the option to remain at its current setting.

I’ve also started a discussion topic that covers the other specific privacy holes we want fixed, and how to word the rules appropriately:
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=81&uid=122212854462445

Please feel free to join the group if you feel so inclined, and invite your friends as well!

It’s not targeted to my identity, for one. In most every case you’ve mentioned it’s used temporarily to display adverts, not sold off.

It’s odd, Future Tense’s not been publicised if not carried in any of the 3 or 4 markets I’ve lived in over the past 12 years.

OOOoooorrr you could just get snooty with me for not agreeing with the rest of geekdom that facebook = bad because we’re all too cool to admit we use it like everyone else.

The biggest problem is to actually have a significant number of people leaving Facebook to have any effect.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=117283144970446

Of course, if I break that 1 million well in advance of July 4, the group’s name might have to be changed.

i am 100% confident that everything facebook does is to support their bottom line. part of that is not pissing off or scaring the shit out of your users. they don’t have an interest in intentionally screwing you into revealing to your boss that you shoot H on the weekends. the security settings regarding how other people see you aren’t related to the broader data mining issue, which i see as more critical.

as far as all the putting 2 and 2 together and now they know your blood type. yes, with enough tricks and cleverness they could probably figure out what my every errant thought is. but FACEBOOK is the one with the power to do that kind of data mining. and facebook is out for 1 thing: money. they can’t make money off of invading your privacy in a way that isn’t useful to a marketing firm. yea, maybe they could figure out your SSN. but why? why does a multi billion dollar company want to know that. what are they gonna do, thief my identity and steal the 30 bucks in my back account? as long as facebook defends itself well against a malicious hacker getting that kind of info its not an issue.

and besides, there really isn’t that much about you on facebook that could be useful to a thief.
lastly, fuck privacy. there is literally nothing in my life i’d be scared of admitting to anyone, except that smoking pot is illegal. if privacy were dead, and we all just admitted to each other that sometimes we use recreational drugs, and sometimes we jack off to internet porn, people would get over this trivial bullshit. and once no one cares about all our little foibles, then we can all stop lying to half the people in our lives by default.

1) You will be making a stand/statement against evil (yes, evil).

2) You will be standing up for your privacy (and others privacy rights) with actions (not words).

3) You will not be prone/accessible for future evil/nefarious doings. As an example, there is a known exploit for certain “instant personalization” features. This is just one such possibility.

4) You will be able to get out while you still can. I would not be surprised to see deletion impossible.

5) You will find out that you really hated Facebook after all.

Except they have one less person contributing to their daily traffic and their numbers when I leave. They have one less person making their service valuable. Times me by 500k or 1million and we start making a dent in their bottom line.

I don’t get discouraging people from deleting their accounts.

It’s a data-miner’s dream because of those people who jump onto every quiz. Just look at those quizzes, apps and games on the news feed (or if you’ve blocked the apps, look on the wall of the biggest offender among your friends). Cumulatively, they look a lot like the questionnaires that pop-psychology fans used to fill out to figure out if they were an ENFP or an INTJ.

Give a marketer access to the profile of a heavy app/game/quiz user, and they’ll have a psychological profile of that person paired with a name and geographic information, as well as their favourite regular haunts and their probable route to work.

So I don’t fiddle with apps, and I avoid quizzes, and mainly use FB to share benign photos with family and friends who are far away. I don’t really fear Facebook, because I’m tight with my personal info.

But even without joining anything, I can still be demographically profiled – I’m the kind of consumer who is tight with my personal info. I guarantee they have a whole portfolio on the type of things that people like me might buy, the type of politicians I probably vote for, the range of opinions I probably hold on certain things.

i have gone to the perhaps inadvisable lengths of adding my home phone, email, and snail mail address to my facebook info. those are the most personal pieces of data i can think of disclosing in that forum. should someone data mine it in the future, in what way could i be harmed? i already get junk mail and spam to a degree where I don’t think i could notice an increase. i never get solicitations via phone because i’m on the do not call list.

the other data on that website consists of pictures of me, and the list of people i am friends with. while all of that is very useful to someone trying to sell me a stick of gum, none of it is useful to any sort of “big brother” or malicious agency seeking to do me harm. unless i become a spy for the CIA, or a target of a mob hit, knowing who i hang out with on saturday doesn’t give anyone any leverage over me.

it isn’t wrong to want to keep information about ourselves private, but i fail to see the impending disaster brought on by disclosing aforementioned data that all of these privacy discussions seem to imply.

Access to personal data
This right, commonly referred to as subject access, is created by section 7 of the Data Protection Act. It is most often used by individuals who want to see a copy of the information an organisation holds about them. However, the right of access goes further than this, and an individual who makes a written request and pays a fee is entitled to be:
* told whether any personal data is being processed;
* given a description of the personal data, the reasons it is being processed, and whether it will be given to any other organisations or people;
* given a copy of the information comprising the data; and
given details of the source of the data (where this is available). (link).

(That is, my Kia.)

there are plenty of 3rd party apps that can give you viruses, steal your data, spam your friends…..and its really easy to never use any of them. i have, in fact, never used a 3rd party ap (including twitter apps) in my facebook life.

data mining is the way we pay for these services. this is america, shit doesn’t come free. unless you can show how the data itself is used for evil (showing an ad to someone is not evil) then your statement is hyperbolic.

Also, data mining is fine, as long as it’s up front how that data is used. Google makes clear claims about how they use the data that they get (if the claims aren’t factual, or they change their stance, then they deserve all the flak they get for it.) Facebook doesn’t.

Make a comment and refer to someone as Mom? It’s just one small step until she mentions something about her mom or dad. Once that name is out there, they have your mother’s maiden name.

Yes, I’m blowing some things out of proportion, but none of it is that far fetched really. You and everyone you know make innocuous comments all the time, what movies you see, where you ate, who your friends are and a lot of it can be used to build a profile of you. And this is all information that you have provided of your own volition that someone else gets paid to then sell simply so you can be advertised to better.

http://futuretense.publicradio.org/about/