Options for users to preserve the privacy standards they have established have become confusing, impractical and unfair".
Facebook
Facebook is not your friend. Its "real name"
policy is enough reason to refuse to use it, but there is so much more
nastiness in Facebook.
I don't use it, and you shouldn't either.
Facebook makes a practice of
telling users to rat on their friends who use aliases.
I
think we can formulate the principle that any social network that asks
its members for information about other people is abusive.
Unfriend Facebook now — you are its product, not its customer.
Facebook says that a user
can't have Facebook's data about him, because it's a trade secret.
Pages that contain Facebook "like" buttons enable Facebook to track visitors to those pages.
Facebook tracks the users that see 'like' buttons, even users who never visited
facebook.com and never click on those buttons.
The ACLU has a way of enabling users to click a Facebook "like"
button, which avoids this problem. Its pages have a link called "like us
on Facebook" that leads to a Facebook page where it is possible to push
a "like" button for the ACLU. But if you don't follow that link,
Facebook gets no information about your visit to the ACLU page.
Here's an
example of the practice.
Facebook exploits its users by
conscripting them for ads.
Facebook settled a lawsuit by promising users will be able to
"limit" this use of their names and photos in ads shown to other users. However, since this is "opt-out", by default users will still be exploited. What's more,
it may not even be a complete opt-out.
Don't depend on Facebook to store any data that you might miss
if Facebook takes it away from you.
A German regulator says that
Facebook's face recognition is illegal.
Social networks, for lonely people, may only show them
how lonely they are.
Facebook blocked links to the humor site lamebook which facebook is trying to crush.
This
shows how it is a bad thing that so many people use facebook pages
instead of setting up their own sites using many different providers.
Facebook messaging
further threatens user privacy.
Don't use Facebook. Facebook
permanently records everything you do, even what you look at, even items that are "deleted". And presumably gives them to the CIA. A
timeline shows how Facebook has increasingly shown contempt for privacy.
EFF says that
"the answer" is to complain to Facebook. I suggest another answer:
don't put your personal information in Facebook. If you use Facebook at
all, just tell people how to contact you in other ways.
A convicted blackmailer who helped Putin
crush independent media in Russia now owns a large stake in Facebook.
Facebook
deleted a statement by a human rights group, then said that was a mistake.
That Facebook invited the group to post the statement again — instead of undoing the deletion — demonstrates arrogance.
However,
the problem here goes deeper. It is not good for human rights groups
(or anyone's) statements to be posted using a platform where statements
are censored.
Facebook
deleted a photo of two men kissing, which was used to support a kiss-in in a pub that had shown bias against gays.
The person who posted it thinks that Facebook is not anti-gay, but
rather than it is quick to censor whatever someone complains about.
While
it might seem that the former would be worse, I think the latter makes
facebook really dangerous. Don't use Facebook as a substitute for your
own web site!
Facebook has
mysteriously closed several pages of anti-budget-cut activists in the UK.
Facebook has turned on
automatic face recognition on photos.
Facebook says that it only suggests identifications for faces in
photos for people who are the user's friends. However, it might run the
algorithm over every photo posted and not publicly announce the results.
I ask people not to post photos of me on Facebook.
Now Facebook tells your "friends" everything that you do using a large collection of other network services.
This will at least give people
an idea of how much information those services tell Big Brother about all their users.
Facebook asks its users to provide their entire list of
other people's email addresses.
This
by itself is surveillance of those other people, but Facebook uses it
to go further and try to guess the relationships of people who are not
Facebook users.
That information must be worth some money to companies. It is surely
worth money to the secret police of any country that isn't democratic
enough.
However, principal wrong here is not that Facebook can
guess which non-users know you or me. It is that Facebook collects
information from its users about whether they know you or me.
I think we can formulate the principle that any social network that
asks its members for information about other people is abusive.
Facebook
apps have access to that user's information — and the users' ffiends'
information, too. Thus, if you make the mistake of using Facebook, even
if you let a company access your data,
any of your ffiends can give the company access to your data.
(Although Facebook uses the term "friends", that is an abuse of
language; a user's "friends" are often not really friends, and being
"friends" on Facebook is not the way to treat a friend anyway. Therefore
I propose the replacement term "ffiends", replacing the "r" with the
"f" of Facebook.)
"Logging out" of Facebook
does little to stop its surveillance.
In particular, every page with a "like" button still knows who you are.
Facebook made changes in response to this article, to delete one
cookie that identified the users. It seems there are two other cookies
which also identify the user, but Facebook says users should not object
to them because they are made for benign purposes.
If that is true, so what? They still track you, unless you stop using Facebook, and delete all its cookies for good and all.
But
Facebook can track you through your IP address too, if you don't use
TOR to disguise that. To avoid being tracked by Facebook "like" buttons,
you need to block your browser from showing them or accessing the
Facebook page that generates them. This is necessary if you
ever used Facebook from that IP address, even if you stop using Facebook, and delete all its cookies for good and all.
This page gives details
about how much facebook tracks users' browsing, which applies even to users that don't have facebook accounts.
Facebook tries to discourage users from visiting other web sites.
(This article uses the word "content" to refer to published works. I
think that is a bad practice since that term disparages the works.
See.)
More on how much facebook tracks users.
The US Federal Trade Commission ruled that Facebook's violation of its stated privacy policies
was illegal.
It is proper to make Facebook keep its promises, but this does not go
far enough to make Facebook acceptable to use. It does not limit
Facebook's data collection — for instance, it doesn't stop Facebook from
collecting of data about browsing through "Like" buttons. It only
limits what Facebook can do with that data, and certainly does not stop
Facebook from handing it over to Big Brother under the U SAP AT RIOT
act.
Facebook in Europe
may be required to discard some user data after a time, without sending it to the US.
This may reduce the harm that Facebook does, but is not even close to
enough to make it ethically acceptable. Most of the criticisms reported
in this site remain valid.
Anyone can get a Facebook user's
personal information by buying ads on Facebook.
It appears Facebook spontaneously sends phone messages to people in India who have had no connection with Facebook.
This user is trying to find out why.
Facebook is not just surveillance.
It also does censorship of photos based on prudish criteria.
Number of friends on Facebook
measures narcissism.
Facebook has put an outrageous
trademark claim on the word "book" into its terms of service.
To be dependent on Facebook, or any other specific company you could
not replace with another, is to make yourself vulnerable to unbounded
legal aggression. Don't be a fool — unfriend Facebook today rather than
accept these terms.
Facebook "apps" that some persons run get
access to everything their "friends" make visible to them, and may hand all that info to a company.
While this article shows that there is currently a way to turn that
off, I expect that Facebook will take any necessary steps to ensure that
most users don't do so. The purpose of those apps is to get access to
that data, and I'm pretty sure that benefit figures, to Facebook's
advantage, into the financial arrangements between the app developer and
Facebook. Facebook will make sure it does not lose that advantage.
Facebook has a
history of blocking the posting of links about certain controversial political issues.
Facebook sends political messages as
coming from people who have clicked Like buttons.
Facebook recently settled a lawsuit, promising to stop a very similar
practice involving ads, but these political messages are not considered
"ads" and Facebook continues to send them.
A credit agency in Germany plans to evaluate people's creditworthiness by who their “
friends” are on facebook.
The lesson is that we should make sure that no activities collect information about lots of people's social networks.
Facebook is sneakily leading users to
send email to other users via facebook.
Facebook has automatically pushed users' @
facebook.com email addresses (which they never asked for) into the
contact lists in other people's phones.
The lesson here is that it is a fundamental mistake to trust a
company such as Facebook to give anyone data about you. It will give
them the data it wants them to have, not the data you want to give them.
Facebook:
the most congenitally dishonest company in America.
Copyright 2011 Richard Stallman released under Creative Commons Attribution Noderivs 3.0 unported
