schmevil

Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole (Wall Street Journal)

Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent.

The practice, which most of the companies defended, sent user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users clicked on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.

Advertising companies were given information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.

...

In addition to Facebook and MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5, Xanga and Digg also sent advertising companies the user name or ID number of the page being visited. (MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.) Twitter also was found to pass Web addresses including user names of a profile being visited on Twitter.com.

Read More.

The EFF has put together a timeline of FB's privacy policies:

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. ...

Information set to "everyone" is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to "everyone." You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends' names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to "everyone." ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Read More.

First off, it's been wonderful to see you all come together. You guys did a great job of linking up my info post. Keep linking. There are already enough rumors, we don't want to encourage their spread. The other reason I want you guys to keep linking, is that I want to give as much of the membership as possible, a chance to connect with each other. We've all made friends at the comm, but not all of us had the forethought to exchange contact info.

Thanks to all of the membership, for being awesome. Special thanks to everyone who took positive steps towards maintaining our community.

refraction has offered lots of helpful advice on how to approach the Abuse Team.

raattgift has commented with clarifications on US intellectual property law.

pandanoai created a backup of the comm, early in February, and acroamatica has it mirrored here.

yatsuha made a syndicated feed for our Insane Journal backup, so we can watch it on LJ.

We've also received comments of support from Gail Simone and Warren Ellis. It means a lot, thank you both. ETA: and now Kurt Busiek as well!

Going Forward

Scans Daily at Insane Journal is picking up. The mod team will be updating the comm momentarily with the rules rewrite were working on before all this happened. Don't worry guys, nothing scary. *g* Unfortunately, IJ has a 1000 member limit on its comms, so this likely won't be our permanent home, but please do join and keep the spirit of SD alive. noscans_daily is up and running. We hope it will be everything scans_daily was, albeit without the scans. We'll try to have all the bugs worked out of both comms as soon as possible. Please bear with us in the meantime.

I haven't yet had a chance to go through all the comments on the info post, so if you have an urgent question that hasn't been answered, you can message me, rabican, or stubbleupdate. A lot of people, (really, a lot of people), have been asking if there's anything they can do to help. I've thought about it, and there are a couple of things.

1) Information. If you're an expert on intellectual property and copyright, share some of that knowledge. If you've been TOSed for copyright violations, share that experience with us.

2) Post. Seriously guys, post. At Scans Daily 2.0 and noscans_daily. Because we are not beaten.

3) Make love fanworks, not war. One of things we were working on, before the blowout, was sprucing up the comm. There's no reason we can't go forward with that. We are need of a profile banner and a new layout. Think about it - a contest will be announced shortly. If you like your graphics 100x100, shareable icons are welcome too. In fact, gankable commemorative icons for us all to share? Pure win.

4) Make love (to Scans Daily), not war. It's been great to hear your stories. How you discovered scans_daily, and what it meant to you. Keep writing them.




Again, thanks, all of you. We'll keep you guys updated as to what we're working on.

Although I read (and sometimes write) slash, I've never really considered slash to be an important part of my fannish identity. I'm as likely to fall for a het ship, or femslash ship, as a slash ship, and it's even more likely for me to not ship much of anything at all. And although I have many friends in the slash community, I don't consider it to be my fannish home base.

So what makes a slasher? Are you a slasher? Why do you consider yourself to be (or not to be) a slasher?

[Poll #1347864]

Holy shit! Lawrence Lessig is a member of the eljay advisory board? I love his work. *fangirls* OMG. Here he is on Democracy Now, talking about net neutrality.

***

I'm working on my giant summer project of much doom, skimming through various thinkers for usable quotes, and I've been reminded of my idea of a comic strip about Zarathusta Superhero. His superpowers would include enhanced senses and communication with animals and dead people, but his real power would be Philosophy! (just as Science! is Reed Richards' real power). His sidekick would be a trusty philosorapter named Wise Man. They'd have travel the country side, preaching Enlightenment, dancing, reciting poetry, and kicking ass.

y/y?

Have you voted? Polls close Thursday, May 29, 9PM PDT. If you haven't been following the dramarama, icarusancalion has a collection of election links here, with a focus on fandom.

The current first preference frontrunner, with 28.1% of vote, is legomymalfoy, a longtime member of fandom and the lj Abuse Team. jameth, with 17.9% is next. I'm sorry to report that I am in fact pathetic enough to have read through all of the comment threads of the vote post, and a ridiculous number of related threads at various candidates' and voting bloc's journals.

I'm am not impressed with jameth. Why?

1. He's done nothing to reign in, or even distance himself from his supporters' bullying and outright trolling, of anti-Jameth posters.
2. His supporters employ icons which can trigger seizures in epileptics. He finds this funny.
3. He has accused legomymalfoy and rm of ballot stuffing.
4. He has thrown a bushel of strawmen at rm, in order to paint her as a despotic, censor-happy evil thing that does no good.
5. He considers fans to be inherently dishonest and mentally imbalanced.

Also:

Livejournal users, Jameth needs your help to support the lulz!

Please login to LJ, go here, enter jameth in all three fields and submit your vote for LJ board!.

Encyclopedia Dramatica endorses jameth. Nuff said.

ETA: Anti-Jameth Bingo Card. Fandom is running a smear campaign against jameth. O rly?!

Even knowing that the LJ Advisory Board will likely have an extremely limited capacity to affect LJ policy, I don't want to reward this utter jackass with a great item on his resume, emotional validation and a free trip to Istanbul.

Do you?

For the record, I voted for legomymalfoy, rm and vichan.

So how much are you willing to pay for Radiohead's new album?

The recap for those who've been living under a rock:

Radiohead is releasing their new album IN RAINBOWS exclusively through their website, having elected not to sign with a label. You can order what they're calling a discbox for 40 pounds, to be shipped by Dec 3, or you can download a copy, which will have none of the nifty extras that the discbox will.

The catch?

You pay what you want.

You can choose to pay 80 bucks or nothing at all.

Radiohead's fanbase is a loyal and freaky one, so I have no doubt they'll not only recoup recording costs on this album, but make a pretty penny. From what I've seen, people are paying anywhere from $30 to, of course, nothing, but I think that most people WILL pay (though not much). In fact, I think the numbers will go down something like those of museums or performances where donations are requested, but no fee posted. I think that most people actually want to a) do the 'right thing'; and b) show their tremendous appreciation for the work artists share with us. No, really.

But let's look at those other fuckers.

Revisiting the (il)logic of illegal downloads circa Napster, many people argued that the record industry was so bloated and corrupt that they didn't deserve 'our' money. That if artists and the industry were more honest with us about costs, and charged a fair price that we'd be happy to pay. (This was an awesome way to justify theft that I used myself on occasion, but an incredibly ridiculous argument when put into real world terms. i.e. It's totally cool to walk out of Coach with an armful of bags because THE MAN is overcharging for them newayz).

So here's a group of artists who are being upfront with you, saying hey, we know CDs are overpriced and we don't want to take advantage of you. We want to give you this amazing gift and in return, we're asking for donations to the cause.

If ANY ONE of those Napster-justifying digital thieves decides not to pay for this album, they're guilty of incredibly base hypocrisy. Because dude, they're doing exactly what you asked for. Of course there's another argument used to justify illegal downloads that they can move on to, if the first one fails. (It's way more interesting than the first).

The other argument for illegal downloads is that 'information' should be free, and digitized media is just information. Most of the really good articles on this subject are academic. One of my favourites is "How the Internet's Spirit of Sharing Must Be Broken". If you read past the jargon and academic cool, it's this awesome pro-Capitalist, pro-intellectual property rights, wacky rant, about how digital downloads will bring about Ragnarok. Which, hey, in some ways illegal downloading does have the potential to change society as we know it (dun dun dun) - ask any IP/copyright/trademark lawyer how important it all is to the functioning of the world economy. It also uses a lot of really scary Foucoult-derived language and concepts about the importance of 'breaking' and 'disciplining' online criminals.

In any case, it does something that I think is really important. It looks the phrase, "information wants to be free," in the eye and spits on it. Why?

1. Information doesn't want anything. It's a concept and concepts don't have needs and desires. People, however do. (Some) people want information to be free. And they want it not just because they're cheap, but because they've embraced an ideology of free and total access to information. Saying "information wants to be free" is way to hide all of this behind a 'law' of 'information.'

2. Information as a category is so broad that it's kind of a useless. Seriously, what the fuck are we talking about? No seriously -- the argument is that we need to remove 'information' from economic and power relations. So there's no longer an information economy, no longer a system of patents, no longer the possibility of being paid for your intellectual labours. But let's take this further -- no state secrets, no differentiation between public and private spheres, no privacy full stop. And it goes further still (but I don't have time for that because I'm running out the door in five).

3. Including music in the category of information and arguing that it therefore also wants to be/should be free is really a sneaky way of saying that art should not be tied to commercial projects. The implication is that free art is BETTER. That art is corrupted from its true purpose when it is done for pay, and that TRUE artists would continue to produce art, regardless of the paycheque. Which is true in a sense - art will find a way (hello fandom), but ignores the very basic fact that paying artists is how we ensure they are capable of continuing their practice, in the manner that we and they have become accustomed to. Artists need to eat, and in our capitalist-democratic society, government funding is hard to come by, patrons even harder. Demanding that music be free makes it that much harder for economically disadvantaged musicians to share their work with you. Where would hip-hop be without the money that Big Music has invested in it? Certainly it would be a different genre, but would it be a genre you (everybody you) has heard of?

Information wants to be free is really a techno-libertarian call for massive societal change. Which is fine. *g* But it's been adopted by people who, I think, are less libertarian than they are criminal.

So how much are you willing to pay for Radiohead's new album? If the answer is nothing (and you're actually going to listen to it *g*), I want you to really think about why that's your answer. Total overthrow of the capitalist economy, or simple greed? Yes, those are the only two options. ;-)

Aaaand I need to run. Thus concludes a poorly thought out rant.

***

Just a sidenote: Radiohead is of course not the first act to go this route, but they're the biggest and the one that's going to have the most impact within the industry. This post talks about their motivations:

"We were having endless debates, spending entire afternoons talking about, 'Well, if we do something, how do we put it out?' ... It just became this endless and pointless discussion. Because in our dreams, it would be really nice to just let off this enormous stink bomb in the industry."

...

How smelly of a stink bomb is Radiohead's move, record industry-wise? The band is a powerhouse; though they're the most adventurous rock group working today, Radiohead manages to keep a supremely loyal fanbase, and their albums consistently sell well. Any label would have swooned for it -- though, as ever, only on terms unfair to the artists.


Come on everybody, let's all dig into our wallets and be fair to artists by throwing wads of cash at them!

I've recently become addicted to reading scans_daily and while posting a comment, noticed that, amazingly, some people still have this journal friended. Hi people! My last public post was on 09 May 2005, on the so-very-essential subject of 28 Days Later fic. It's amazing how much has changed in my life, in yours and in fandom since I was a regular lj user. The geography, technology, language and culture have changed (because the internet evolves at such a fast pace) and yet many of these changes have occurred in utterly predictable ways.

There's a reply to that post from a deleted account. Just seeing her name recalled to me conversations that as of a moment ago, were gone from my conscious memory. Several other journals I followed have been deleted, or fallen into inactivity, but amazingly, the vast majority of journals I friended are still being updated regularly. Too, most of the writers, vidders, icon makers and meta writers are around, albeit, many of them in vastly different fandoms (or parts of fandom).

I came back to online fandom sometime this year, drawn by the same thing that got me interested in the first place - the search for fic. I've taken years-long breaks before but this one was a little different in that while I wasn't reading fic, or meta, or watching vids, I was still connected to my online identity through the livejournal comments I continued to receive. In some ways, it was like receiving letters that were lost in the mail for a decade or two, reminding me of flamewars I'd fought, fics I'd written, people I loved, a person that I'd been.

The other day I got feedback for a fic I took down four years ago. A story I'd long since given up on. A story I only vaguely remembered myself (a few of the good parts and all of the really bad ones). I went to some trouble removing that fic from the google-able internet and yet it's still out there, being circulated.

It's incredible how, when you go online (and this is especially true of a community like fandom, and fandom on lj, I think), you so quickly create a space and identity that are your own, but are also part of a larger community that continues without you, still engaged with you, while you yourself are not participating. People continued to read and engage with my fic, meta and comments despite my absence. They wrote back. They wrote to each other about my fannish output. They kept me alive and present when I actually, physically was not present. Mostly these were people I didn't know well, or at all, and for whom, it's entirely possible, I didn't exist beyond that output. But they owned me, just as you own me, (well at least, those of you who actually remember who I am). Own whatever part of me that you engaged with. Even if I spent the next two years deleting every comment I made since I first went online, I would still exist online. Somewhere. And so would you.

The internet is forever. ;-)

***

And going back to the subject of scans, if anyone is interested in old school X-Men, I've posted scans of Uncanny X-Men #1 and Giant Size X-Men Annual #1 at fullscans_daily. Particularly amusing in UX#1 is Professor Xavier's telepathically controlled jet plane.

heathersy wants her flist to put their political ramblings behind a cut tag. Her reason? Fandom does not share a political hive mind, and calling the other party a bunch of evil, inbred yahoos does not endear you to your fellow fen who vote for them.

If I was American, I would vote Democrat. They're the closest it gets to my own political goals without going with a fringe-party. The Green Party is not only still very, very fringe - talk to me when it's about policy - but they're also unrealistically unwilling to compromise. I'm not an ideologue and I have no interest in associating with ideologues. Ideologues are so busy shining with their passion for the Truth, that they're blinded to their own idiocy.

Supporting Bush is not an act of evil.

Supporting the war in Iraq is not an act of evil.

Supporting a ban on gay marriage is not an act of evil.

Supporting the Republican Party of the United States of America is not an act of evil, no matter what some lobbyists may tell you.

Generally speaking, evil takes far more concerted effort than any politician is capable of, being mostly concerned with getting re-elected, and making enough deals to get his or her pet bill on the books. Politics, is by necessity, a dirty game where you make a lot of compromises, especially when you're trying to do what you think is the right thing. It's a hell of lot easier to keep people happy by sitting on your ass and rewarding cushy contracts to supporters, than it is to take a stand. I have nothing but respect for the politicians who actually DO THEIR JOB, even if I don't agree with their goals.

Not considering the other guy's position isn't evil. It's dumb. Likewise, assuming that you have the Truth on your side.

I don't think we should be cutting political commentary. I do think that we, as a community, could stand to be a little less blissfully reactionary about American politics, and entertain the notion that someone just might not agree with us. We* spend enough time qualifying our arguments about canon in order to avoid starting flamewars (god forbid someone disagree with your masochist!Peter essay) that we should damn well know how to do the same for other kinds of posts. Just as masochist!Peter is open to interpretation, so are the evils of the Republican Party.

Dammit.



* Of course, by 'we' I mean those of us who don't spend most of their time trying to yank other people's chains. Heh.