As I have been repeatedly saying, do not divulge personal/confidential information in social networking sited.
The information,apart from being misused by the site is also likely to be accessed by third parties.
” A major security flaw left the accounts of Facebook users exposed for years before it was fixed, security firm Symantec says. Around 100,000 Facebook applications accidentally shared users’ access tokens—described as a “spare key” to the account that allow the apps to do things like post info to a user’s wall—with advertisers and other third parties, the Wall Street Journal reports. Facebook says it took care of the problem after Symantec told the company about it last month.
…
Facebook’s complex ecosystem—with thousands of independent apps and complex data flows to and from apps—is a problem of its own creation.- Ben Edelman, an assistant professor
at Harvard Business School”
Symantec today warned that advertisers, analytic platforms, and other third parties may be able to access Facebook users’ personal information using inadvertently leaked application tokens. The security company advised Facebook users to change their passwords on the social networking site in order protect their accounts from being mined..
Danger lurks when you go public with private details.
Even before Shana Greatman Swers got pregnant, the 35-year-old married consultant had a habit of posting on Facebook about nearly anything. She loved writing about her husband, Jeff, her friends at work, and the prospect of having a baby. People who knew her followed every turn on the social network, starting when she wrote on March 10 that “Shana Greatman Swers and Jeff are thrilled to announce to the world that little baby Swers will be joining our family this September. Good thing we bought the bigger house!” But the chain of messages that the Gaithersburg resident wrote over the next eight months would ultimately become a modern interactive narrative of the joys of pregnancy and the harrowing uncertainties that develop when medical complications set in. Even in her toughest moments, she tapped out Facebook updates from her iPhone to relatives and friends — a mix of people from George Washington University, where she went to college; the Corporate Executive Board, her workplace in Rosslyn; and her old buddies from back home in California. With permission from the Swers family, The Washington Post has edited and annotated her Facebook page to tell her story from pre-baby date nights to a medical odyssey that turned the ecstasy of childbirth into a struggle for life.
Very recently I came across an article about the Family not informing the child of the death of his(or her) for fear of upsetting and they kept it up for more than two months.
Unlike an earlier case involving a Facebook entry while her child was dying. this note is a cry for help.
What do people ‘friends’ column in Facebook stands for?
It is meant for Friends; not merely for flirting unidentified.
Very concept of social networking is lost by incidents like these.
People should be more Humane.
If you are a friend you would have rushed to her help,at least called her.
While at it, what about her Family?-mute spectators?
Story:
On Christmas, 42-year-old British charity worker Simone Back posted a Facebook message reading, “‘Took all my pills be dead soon so bye bye every one.” 148 comments—many of them mocking her—followed. The next day she was found dead.
LOS ANGELES (CBS/AP)Stephen Garcia clearly didn’t want to live without his ex-girlfriend, Katie Tagle, or share custody of their infant son, so in an apparent murder-suicide, the angry California father killed his child, then himself. Hours later he was still telling the world just how he felt, in a suicide note on Facebook, possibly posted by a friend.
In the days before his death, Garcia posted seemingly desperate messages to his ex-girlfriend, along with pictures of him and Wyatt, and video clips of the baby at a younger age. On his MySpace page, he set his mood to “scared,” and wrote the words, “one more day.”
The baby’s mother, Katie Tagle, filed a request last December for a restraining order in San Bernardino County Court, but it was denied on Jan. 12 because Garcia was not considered a “threat to petitioner or the minor child.”
According to the Hi-Desert Star, Tagle sought restraining orders against Garcia several times, amid claims he sent her threatening messages, but was denied by at least two judges. A restraining order was granted eventually, says the paper, but another judge did not uphold it.
Apart from the ethics of divulging confidential information, Myspace has the cheek to say ‘data can not identify a person’
If so, how are they are marketing advertising space?
Is it that advertisers go in without knowing which profiles they are addressing to?
If so, it is the most stupid thing to advertise with out data.
Note that Myspace has not denied divulging information .
Story.
MySpace has been sharing with its advertisers data that can be used to identify user profile pages, but the company doesn’t consider that to be a problem.The company said it did not consider the data to be information that could identify a person, partly because MySpace doesn’t require members to use their real names. The social networking site acknowledged transmitting information to advertisers that included a user ID and the last page viewed before a user clicked on an ad.
Some of the advertisers and Web analytics firms used on this site may place “tracking cookies” on your computer. We are telling you about them right upfront, and we want you to know how to get rid of these tracking cookies if you like.
Tracking cookies are small text files that can tell such companies what you are doing online, even though they usually don’t record your name or other personably identifiable information. These cookies are used by these companies to try and match ads to a user’s interests. They are used all over the Web, but in most cases, their presence is only disclosed deep inside privacy policies.
We want you to know how to get rid of these tracking cookies if you like. Here are links to pages where you can opt out of the cookies set by our ad-placement contractor and our analytics contractor:
We’d prefer a totally opt-in system, but, as far as we know, the ad industry doesn’t have a practical one as of now.
If you want to clean out all tracking cookies from all your Web sites, here are links where you can download three programs that can clean out tracking cookies:
You must be logged in to post a comment.