It would appear the Facebook and MySpace have been sending personally identifiable information to advertisers despite their own privacy policies that state the contrary.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 65596.html

Good thing I don't click on ads, I guess, but this seems like a pretty huge problem. I also foresee some big class action lawsuits on the horizon, and possibly government intervention. Nothing like the government getting its mitts into something to screw it up.

They'll just argue that clicking on the ad equals saying yes to whatever they want. Kinda like when you drive your car onto a pay-to-park territory where crossing the private property line is considered as a legal contract where the driver agrees to the terms of the owner of said parking area. However the car parks don't send your personal information to third parties but neither does the website until the user tells them to. Cheap and low but a good team of attorneys could pull it off.

One of the reasons I never got a Facebook or Myspace account. I can't believe how stupid most people are for putting their real name, interests, pictures and all that shit up for grabs on the internet. And yeah, you have some privacy settings on there, but a) anyone mildly handy with the internet can circumvent most of those and b) you're still uploading them to a third party that is being co-owned by several major commercial corporations (!).

The funny thing is, my social life has very much deteriorated because of all this. I am out of the loop of what my friends who live a little further apart do and think, what their social status is (married, single, etc), and so forth. This, conversely, means friendships that slowly disintigrate and not getting invited to places or parties because I don't register on those people's Facebook friends list. The only solution is regularly emailing and calling them, but since it would always be me doing those things (they would just do it via facebook but since I'm not on there...) that gets old pretty quickly.

So yeah, I hope Facebook burns in hell. At least I don't have to deal with this shit:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... ok-privacy

Do what I did... register under a pseudonym, carefully filter the pictures you post, and friend people just to stay in touch. I'm under Satis if anyone wants to friend me. Better let me know who you are, though... I don't accept friends request from anyone other than people I'm legitimately friends with. It's sad how many people will send out friend requests to people they don't know.

Just thought i'd say, Facebook is really badly pissing me off lately. Mini-rant inbound:

1. I have a "friend" (actually cousins wife) who write status updates on ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING that occurs in her life, ie, what she thinks, even to the point of saying what she thinks without explaining it, e.g. "I am freaking out now... I don't like all this uncertainty "

One in 3 of her posts are like this and number 2 is always one of her own friends asking "What's up?" etc. It fucks me off because she is a whiny attention whore.

2. Ended up "liking" alot of stuff like bands, films and sportspersons over the years and now i'm getting spammed on my wall with their "updates". Isn't there just a nice way to list the things you like without getting spammed?

I've reduced my friends list severely to around 45. Simply because the mindless and meaningless updates were fucking me off no end.

How this POS is worth $100 bn, to me, is the capitalist wonder of the world.

I add people I know and if they post too much shit I dont care about, I click on the 'display only important updates' for them and that usually does the trick.

Satis i'm adding you!

Derf: i actually know a lot of people posting things like that all the time. Or people posting pictures of every meal they're eating ... yeah that's interesting.

Did you know that Satish seems to be a very popular name in India? -> i can't find you, can you add me?

Oh and i think i found Pevil on facebook, adding her as well.

every meal? that'd be annoying.

Yeah every meal .. now judging at the size of their meals and the amount of junkfood, it's pretty easy to see why they're pretty big! So you can learn a lot from facebook

Hmmm... yea... I've noticed that the bigger the person, the more central to their lives food is. I'm kinda curious which comes first... the food fixation, or the obesity.