Highlights of Life

It seems to me that facebook collects (or has the opportunity to) collect much more information than the other platforms out there.  To even join a “network” that is a university/college, it requires you to enter in your personal email account at that particular institution.  Some people even have their resumes (work history) on there so to speak.  Literally, be it friend, foe, neighbour, peeping Tom, Dick, and Harry, or employer can do a search for your name and look you up.

Even worse, is people can tag others on pictures.  So yesterday, as I took a look at facebook, I realized I belonged to a network, which allowed me to see a lot of pages of people who belonged in the network.  And a classmate of mine had signed up, and then put really embarrassing pictures of another classmate who was extremely drunk and silly looking on her facebook album.  And to top it off, she had tagged it.  Lovely.  At that very moment I was thanking my lucky stars I wasn’t the one in her picture.  How embarrassing.  There it was, out there for the world to see.

And then… there was another classmate who had received a “private” e-present in the picture of a thong, but for some reason it was available for everyone who was a friend of the person to see.  Ewww.  Also embarrassing.

Anyways, it seems according to wikipedia, Facebook has quite a bit of issues with security.  I can just even think of datamining being a big issue with this as people have their real names, their school affiliations, their coursework, their emails, contacts, relatives, and friends… the list is endless.  Scary actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

In fact, wiki talks about how 2 students from MIT downloaded OVER 70 000 PROFILES from facebook as part of a research project.  Here is an excerpt from wikipedia:

Privacy concerns

There have been some concerns expressed regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining. Theories have been written about the possible misuse of Facebook^[22] and privacy proponents have criticized the site’s current privacy agreement. According to the policy, “We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile.” However, some features—such as AIM away-message harvesting and campus newspaper monitoring—have been dropped and Facebook has since responded to the concerns. Facebook has assured worried users the next privacy policy will not include the clause about information collection and has denied any data mining is being done “for the CIA or any other group.”^[23] However, the possibility of data mining by private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook remains open, as evidenced by the fact that two MIT students were able to download, using an automated script, over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 14th, 2005.^[24]

Great… food for thought.