Facebook
Have I mentioned how much I hate it?
First off, they rarely ever let us choose what changes they’re making to the site.
This time, they are but if 30% of users don’t vote, then they’ll just consider the voting advisory instead of actually using it to make a change. That’s 270 million people. Which, how many people actually use facebook instead of making a profile one day and forgetting about it, how many use facebook just for the games, how many use facebook and don’t pay attention to the news, and how many people use facebook and decide that voting just isn’t worth their time?
Which apparently the new changes have some more *wonderful* ideas implemented into it.
So let’s take a look here at what they have in effect right now for their data use policy, and at here for what they propose.
Ok, right off the bat there’s something wrong here. They require you to put in your gender on sign up, that’s how it’s been for quite some time actually but up until now they’ve given you a choice to keep that information to yourself.
In the proposed form: “Your name, profile pictures, cover photos, gender, networks, username and User ID are treated just like information you choose to make public.”
Another big red flag for me is that right now all the information that Facebook receives is what you allow them to take from apps and from what other people tag photos or locations and adding you to a group.
However, in the proposed form: “We receive information about you from your friends and others, such as when they upload your contact information, post a photo of you, tag you in a photo or status update, or at a location, or add you to a group.”
Some additional changes, good or bad, are (and I’ve picked through what was already there so all you see is the changes) :
” For example, we may use the information we receive about you:
We store data for as long as it is necessary to provide products and services to you and others, including those described above. Typically, information associated with your account will be kept until your account is deleted. For certain categories of data, we may also tell you about specific data retention practices.”
I could continue on, but for fear of truly turning this into a tl;dr, I won’t. For now, feel free to examine the remainder of the pages, and add your own concerns.