Here’s a copy of a good article from Network World on FaceBook’s new approach to privacy: one that consists intelling our friends about the sites we visited without asking for our consent first. The article seems to indicate this was an unintended glitch from Facebook, but it sure is a good way to get publicity for a new feature! Seems that’s FaceBook’s modus operandi.
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Facebook’s new features secretly add apps to your profile
By Heather Kelly and Nick Mediati, Macworld
May 06, 2010 10:34 AM ET
When a piece of software is automatically installed on your computer without your knowledge, it’s called malware. But what do you call it when Facebook apps are added to your profile without your knowledge? We discovered Wednesday that this is actually happening, and stopping it isn’t as easy as checking a box in your privacy settings.
If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don’t have to have a Facebook window open, you don’t need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there’s no notification, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings.
The apps appear to be related to Facebook’s latest sharing features and tools. The sites currently leaving this trail all have Facebook integration, and the list includes heavyweights such as the Gawker network of blogs, the Washington Post, TechCrunch, CNET, New York Magazine, and formspring.me.
It isn’t entirely clear what information these apps are pulling from user profiles or feeding back to Facebook. They aren’t automatically visible to friends viewing your profile page, but if you go to an application’s profile page, you can see a list of your friends who also have that app installed, essentially getting a unintentional peek at their browsing habits. On the other side there are sites like the Washington Post’s, which has a Facebook Network News box showing a list of your friends who have recently shared a Washington Post article on Facebook.
How to block the apps
Opting out of Instant Personalization does not stop these apps from appearing. Unfortunately, removing these kinds of applications requires more vigilance than just altering a setting.
To see a list of your current Facebook applications, click Account in the top right corner of Facebook, then select Application Settings from the drop-down menu. If you click on the Edit Settings link for one of the new applications, you’ll always see one tab called Additional Permissions that has a box that’s unchecked by default. Checking it will give that application permission to “Publish recent activity (one line stories) to [your] wall.” Sometimes there is a second tab with an option to add a bookmark for that link to your wall. And a few apps also have a Profile tab where you can add a box to your profile for that site and pick a privacy level for it.
Clicking the X to delete an application will temporarily remove it from your applications list, but it will just be re-added as you return to that site. One work-around is to always log out of Facebook before surfing the Web. Another is to block each application after it appears. In order to permanently block an application, you have to click on the Profile link for that application in the Applications Settings window, then click Block Application in the menu on the left side of the app’s page.
What Facebook intended
The new features in Facebook’s newly rolled-out Open Graph API are supposed to be used, with permission, for things like cross posting comments and reviews on Facebook and external sites. For example, if you are logged in to a site like PC World or Macworld using Facebook Connect and you leave a comment on an article, you’ll see a pop-up message asking if you’d like to publish the comment as a story to your wall. If you click Publish, the comment will show up in your friend’s news feeds.
As any one should do these days, I was performing a search on my name on Google ( could have been Yahoo) to see what came up. I’d been struck to find complete contact info for a friend of mine I hadn’t seen for a while through a web search- not a White Pages search that is.
I was in store for a surprise indeed… The French version of 123 People came up among the top results. I was flabergasted to see they indicated an email address for me and offered a link to my very own ( previously deemed personal) wish list on Amazon.fr!
Amazon, keep my account info private !
Why on earth would I want the entire world out there to see my wish list on Amazon? I might like my friends to see it maybe, but how could Amazon allow my private account information with them, with my full name, to be searchable by a web bot?
To their credit, I got a response within two hours to my contact email, on a Sunday, January 3rd- that’s customer service for you. AND the response was intelligible, even intelligent.
I was simply explained by Damien that Amazon makes client’s wish lists accessible to the World by default, just in case someone out there decides they want to buy me something…Amazon is much obliged to help. It is up to each and every one of us, at this point, to be aware of this and to choose a more private setting by going into our Wish List setting.
Amazon wish list setting selector
Yes, thanks Amazon, but in the real world, we DON’T go around distributing our wish lists to every stranger on the street. Why? Because we don’t WANT to tell them about us. So get off the Kool Aid, and focus on how people act in the Real World before deciding to set your settings, because you might anger a few people there, if they ever find out.
Job Etudiant.com puts it all out there- for ever !
Please note Job Etudiant.com has nothing to do with JobEtudiant.net.
The other way 123 People had been able to grab an email address for me is I had had the insanity of publishing a want ad for a babysitter over a year ago on their site. Little did I suspect they would publish, not only the ad text, but also ALL my contact info: full name, address and phone number, on their site- up to a year after the ad had appeared!
People do NOT expect want ad sites to publish their contact details guys. CraigsList.org has always offered to anonymize posters’ emails, even! Please please please guys, keep your heads on…
In the meantime, I strongly discourage from posting any ads on jobetudiant.com/ unless you wish to become a public figure. JobEtudiant.net does not seem to have such a policy.
— > The powerful people crawler 123 people in France.
– > Amazon.fr’s wish list account area where you can remove the default public setting.
This is an article by Andy Oram, reproduced from Oreilly Radar news
Internet Governance a new unique global challenge after US Sept 30 decision
People interested in coalitions and policy-making on a global scale–topics that are increasingly relevant in a world whose borders are irrelevant to carbon dioxide, flu viruses, and other critical entities–need to learn from other organizations that are dealing with these issues.
This week brings particularly important news about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has been making policy for eleven years under a number of difficult premises:
• It was created hastily and arbitrarily without roots in the communities most interested in its mandate.
• Its concept of stakeholders is boundless, potentially involving anyone who uses the Internet or gets information that has passed at some point over the Internet.
• Its reach is global, and its decisions are affected by issues of language and culture.
Those in charge of ICANN have compounded these intrinsic problems with poor decisions and bad leadership. But ICANN is currently undergoing one of its regular reorganizations. Hopes were on the rise that it may overcome the barriers I’ve listed as well as its own history–at least till this week.
On September 30 2009, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is ICANN’s publicly accountable overseer, announced the most important decision affecting ICANN since its founding: the U.S. government will give up its role as overseer and make ICANN independent. ICANN’s missteps in the past pushed the Commerce Department to seriously consider revoking ICANN’s authority. But that can never happen now.
Instead, a body called the Governmental Advisory Committee provides input to be heeded or ignored by ICANN, at its option. And because this committee is so diffuse, its members possessing different interests and agendas, one can hardly imagine them coming together to strongly voice opposition to a controversial ICANN decision.
Reactions among Internet observers also indicate that this unprecedented assignment of authority was handled in secrecy, which is an odd way, to say the least, for a government agency to carry out a critical policy.
Therefore, the questions that ICANN’s history raises about governance and participation become even more relevant.
The stakes for ICANN and its stakeholders
From October 25-30, at ICANN’s regular meeting in Seoul, board members will meet with representatives of its noncommercial users constituency (NCUC) to consider a proposal to improve relations with these communities. The non-commercial users constituency is an umbrella for a wide range of interested parties, ranging from political action organizations and academic researchers to artists and journalists who use the Internet for distribution and collaboration.
To some extent, the non-commercial users constituency is the soul of ICANN, where the domain-name registrars and registries are its machinery and the commercial users constituency its fuel. ICANN needs all these constituencies–now they’re being renamed “stakeholder groups”–but they are currently way out of balance.
Robin Gross, a long-time volunteer activist with the NCUC, described to me a regulatory environment on ICANN that is all too familiar to people working for the public interest in other settings. The other three stakeholder groups pay experts to work full-time on ICANN issues; these experts travel to all the meetings and are on a first-name basis with the board and staff. In contrast, the NCUC is cobbled together from volunteers having different interests and backgrounds, often struggling to fund a single representative at official gatherings.
NCUC hopes for bigger role in ICANN policy making
It should be pointed out that the four stakeholder groups work through just one branch of ICANN–but an important branch that deals with the issues of most interest to ICANN observers, the top-level domains such as .com, .org, and .edu. This branch of ICANN, called the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), is the focus of the current reorganization.
The source of hope lies in the increased role assigned to the NCUC within the GNSO. (Spend just a couple more hours learning about ICANN, and you too will start eliminating natural language from your speech in favor of abbreviations.)
GNSO was originally made up of six constituencies. The NCUC used to be one of them, and commercial interests encompassed three. Now that the GNSO is made up of four stakeholder groups, one of which corresponds to the NCC, non-commercial interests seem to have a correspondingly larger footprint. But even though only one stakeholder group is now officially commercial, it has far more in common than the NCC does with the registrars and registries (all businesses, of course) to which the other two stakeholder groups are dedicated. So the non-commercial interests are still a minority, not to mention a poor cousin.
Having made some progress and been acknowledged as an important set of stakeholders, the NCUC is focused now on the question of how their representatives will be elected. I won’t go into detail about this question, because I’d lose my readers after the sixth or seventh paragraph, but you can take a peek at a press release from NCUC activists. A more general examination of the GNSO reorganization has been written by Professor Milton Mueller on his Internet Governance blog.
The important point I want to make is that ICANN is on the cusp of improving the effectiveness of the NCUC, and through them the wider public interest that goes beyond the interests of individual registrars, trademark holders, etc.
