Facebook has recently changed their T’s and C’s to allow them to use your information – even if you delete it. Here’s an article with the details.
I am not on Facebook but I am on LinkedIn. I have a measly 20 contacts which rates me as very boring; however, the “network statistics page” shows the following incredible statistics:
(From this I guess we can assume that the familiar maxim that “we are all connected by six degrees of separation” is probably accurate.)
Now consider that I am two degrees of separation from 321,600 people – and this is only a professional/career social network - then you have some idea of the value that Facebook can glean from their information and indeed the reason they don’t want the value of their company to be written down if there is a sudden mass exodus from Facebook.
A congruent development is the availability of face scanning and detection technology in entry level digital cameras such as these. These new cameras are so clever you can take a photo, name the person(s) in the image and from then on the camera will automatically identify the same face in subsequent photos.
The face recognition technology will be in all digital cameras within the next few years. Combine this with Facebook et al and the ability for these cameras to automatically upload images pre-tagged with people’s names and you will see that in the future any photo that is taken of you will almost certainly identify you and has the strong likelihood of being pasted into a Facebook / MySpace / LinkedIn or other social networking site. And if you aren’t tagged then subsequent generations of these types of websites will!
Facebook is a truly amazing resource if exploited and you can certainly guarantee that they will exploit it to the absolute maximum (as this change in their T&C’s will secure).
The problem is our kids are taking photos of themselves in various compromising situations and then posting them on Facebook and the like for their mates to laugh and joke about. Unfortunately, they need to take a moment to consider the ramifications of their use of Facebook because in 5 years time, when their prospective employer has purchased “rights” to access Facebook’s database, they may find the interviewer knows a great deal more about them than they would like! I know through a friend that IBM HR checks all job applicants for Facebook and MySpace pages so it’s already happening.
Use these social networking sites with great care and always set your privacy settings to maximum.
PS: Only the paranoid survive.
1 comment:
I note that Facebook is going to fix their T&C's after an outcry. They have shown their hand and will try again in the future.
Facebook restores privacy terms after user, advocate outcry
Facebook, in the wake of thousands of complaints from users and concerns raised by privacy advocates, has pulled changes to its terms of use that would have allowed the social network to retain certain rights over posted content even after a member had quit the site. A message posted Tuesday evening on the Facebook home page said "the right thing for now" would be to restore its previous terms. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would be crafting a new set of terms with "a lot of input" from users. The New York Times (2/18) , The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) (2/18) , CNET (2/17)
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