The Lair

I’m more than a little late to this party - but it’s a pet peeve and I feel the need to vent. So here we are… yet another instruction on why trusting personal details to a random startup is a bad bad idea. Gather around, kids. This is fun.

Part 1: Ceiling cat Facebook employees are watching you. They know what’s on your profile, they know which profiles you’ve been visiting and it’s apparently a perk to be able to stalk people. Discount the last as Valleywag hyperbole (although no one seems to be rushing to deny it) and you still have an interesting picture. Surprised? People actually seem to be.

Part 2: People on your friendlist can be co-opted for targeted advertising. (More commentary here and here).

Surely that can’t be legal, you cry indignantly. Well, it is - if their terms of service hold up in court. They can pretty much do whatever they want according to that document (remember clicking I agree on that?). It’s their data. There is also an argument in the Slashdot comment thread about Facebook’s deletion policy for profiles - they seemingly promise to resurrect all the data if you should return from your fit of pique.

But I’m being both misanthropic and cynical about this. I no longer consider it my personal crusade to tell people to hide personal information (date of birth? permanent address? good grief, people! how many banks rely on your date of birth for one step of authentication?) on their profiles. There are two reasons for this - first is that it’s amusing to have articles on how to make out like a bandit with FB (translated - thx R for both links). The second reason is that people with lots more information out in public are low hanging fruit for the data miners and criminal elements that are undoubtedly going to invade. Cynically, it’s sort of like staying next to a herd of slow, limping zebras when the lions turn up looking for lunch.

If some inventive dataminer figures out a way to tie in Scrabulous stats to personal information though, I’m pretty much screwed.