What popular websites give you the privacy creeps? |
The vast majority of popular internet sites don’t give me the privacy creeps. Amazon? I’m more troubled by their patent obsessions. eBay/Skype/Stumbleupon? Nope. Yahoo and Google? Still own stock in both. One popular site that gives me the privacy willies:
Facebook.
Yes, it’s suspect using Valleywag as a source because they seem to delight in stirring up dust that isn’t there (National Enquirer of Silicon Valley), but yesterday’s post on Facebook employees profile activities rang true to me:
Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone’s profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you’ve been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama’s intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it’s considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.
Again this is Valleywag and thus could be completely bogus, but I could see a group of FB employees gossiping about what profiles people are looking at and that creeps me out. Why don’t they have a company policy that forbids this type of behavior? They should get one — ASAP. Even a gossip rag like Valleywag can make a good point once in awhile.
Facebook has a chance to react by beefing up their privacy policy.
In case anybody is curious, I’m not worried if FB employees know what FB profiles I’m looking at, heck, those that interested in what I’m up to online can already follow services like Friendfeed which provide a running stream of my daily online activity at some popular sites. I’ve been thinking about pulling all these services together plus Friendfeed and putting it on my personal site which is in need of an update.
Remember AOL offering up data that violated their own privacy policy? They quickly apologized after being hammered over it, but it planted seeds of doubt. I’d put that type of carelessness into privacy that concerns me. In defense of Facebook they do offer many tools to specifically set what types of information you are willing to share with applications, friends and others — except employees can bypass all these settings.
That should change. Let us encrypt our Facebook data even from the prying eyes of employees.
Recently we had one of our bank accounts breached. A real pain that we had to change to a new account, order new checks, change the account that was hooked in different online places. This breach wasn’t because of identity theft online. It was because an employee of a vendor used by a retail store sold our data along with some others. The FBI is still investigating the matter. Moral of the story: a company’s hands are only as clean as their employees.
Must admit it’s real events like this that have prevented me from putting too much information into Facebook. That and Facebook seems a little too closed to me. Are these employee-related concerns valid?
What major sites privacy handling give you the creeps? And does it impact how much time you spend at these sites?
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Yeah, Valleywag is definitely a National Enquirer-style gossip sheet, glib as Owen Thomas may be.
No one who’s not in college really needs Facebook.
Providing too much information can be a form of unpaid servitude, so better to starve the hungry beast.;-)
Comment by Vince Williams — October 28, 2007 @ 6:45 pm PST
Hey TDavid,
I certainly respect your concerns about privacy, but I’d be a lot more worried about Valleywag, frankly. Unlike other companies that *could* cause you harm in theory, Valleywag’s very existence seems to be based upon hurting other people through lies and innuendo. From the FB’ers I know personally, I’d doubt that they’re looking through profiles. Valleywag folks, though, and in particular Owen Thomas have no shame, no ethics. On a related note, I’d rather see people reframe from giving VW any links, any publicity; just feeds their egos.
Don’t get me wrong; I like Snarky. Not everything has to be puppy dogs and love. But there’s a difference between GMSV-style humorous/thoughtful barbs and Valleywag’s immature nastiness.
(oh, and you personally can see who I am via my e-mail address, but I didn’t feel like having Valleywag do some charming character assassination of me, too, like they’ve done with others who were equally undeserving of the negative attention).
Comment by Disgustedby Valleywag — October 28, 2007 @ 7:52 pm PST
Disgustedby Valleywag - Your Valleywag concerns are duly noted and thank you for providing your actual identity in the email space. I’ll respect your privacy and not indentify you.
Out of some 4,500 posts here to date VW has been linked a 20 times. I’ve linked to a few other places (and people) I don’t particularly care for even more times than that. Probably should use on these links I’m not voting for but still can’t bring myself to use rel=nofollow on anything. Nofollow has done nothing for spam and I really dislike how Google wants (expects?) us to use it as some kind of sword. Look, they should be able to figure out that if I’m linking to something hundreds of times over thousands of pages versus 20 that I consider the former source more of a vote. I’d like to think the SE would figure that out.
With that aside even the National Enquirer gets things right once in awhile, so while I hope you are correct about the people you know at FB (and I have no reason to believe otherwise, since I don’t know anybody who knows anybody there directly — you’re the closest person to the truth that I have any experience with), please contact them and ask them to consider changing their privacy policy to something that prevents user information at their site from being accessed for anything other than malicious or routine/maintenance means by them or vendors they do business with.
I don’t think this request is unreasonable and could be a positive PR for FB. Would this addendum feed VW ego? Perhaps a little, but I’m one that tends to believe in business in acting on information regardless of the source if it can bring a positive solution. So many companies would be better if they’d be better listeners.
Comment by TDavid — October 28, 2007 @ 8:53 pm PST
Absolutely agree with you that FB could do more to allay privacy concerns; I’ve actually chatted with my friend about this, and they agree, too.
Comment by Disgustedby Valleywag — October 28, 2007 @ 9:04 pm PST