World-Shaker

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The account, called @NeedADebitCard, is simply trolling Twitter to find people who have just “found” their credit card or got one in the mail, and felt the need to share it with everyone…and include a picture. Not just any picture, but one that shows off the details of their account.

[FACE. PALM.]

(via Don’t Tweet a Pic of Your Bank Card, or This Will Happen)

Survey: 70% of teens hide online behavior from parents →

infoneer-pulse:

Here’s a real shocker: Teens are better than their parents at using the Internet, and are likely to hide some of their online behaviors from them.

That news comes from a 2,017-person survey funded by the online security software maker McAfee, which is pushing a product that helps parents monitor their kids online.

Seventy percent of teens “hide their online behavior” from parents, according to the report, which was released Monday. That’s up from 45% in 2010, the group says.

» via CNN

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thenextweb:

A site called “We Know What You’re Doing“, created by Callum Haywood, aggregates public Facebook and Foursquare data based on the following: - Who wants to get fired? - Who’s hungover? - Who’s taking drugs? - Who’s got a new phone number? Yep. Haywood calls this an “experiment” and is letting you know that you might be sharing things that are way too personal. (via This Site Knows What You’re Doing)

Facebook to show you ads based on your Web browsing →

infoneer-pulse:

Facebook will soon be using your Web browsing to help decide which advertisements you see.

A new Facebook system will use your activity on other websites to send you what Facebook thinks are ads about your current interests. Advertisers will, in effect, be bidding to get their ads in front of you.

Here’s an example: Say a Facebook user visits a travel website and clicks on a page about a vacation package to Las Vegas. If an advertiser has bid on that kind of search, that user could then see ads for discounted trips to Vegas the next time they visit Facebook.

“By bidding on a specific impression rather than a larger group, advertisers are able to show people more relevant ads while also running more efficient and effective campaigns,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a written statement.

» via CNN

Facebook is evil.

Don’t Share with Friends of Friends on Facebook

Based on the most recent information I could find, the average Facebook user has 234 friends. Assuming you have 234 Facebook friends, and they each have 234 Facebook friends, you’re sharing your information with almost 55,000 people.

Public Wi-Fi: How to Connect Safely →

An outstanding overview:

Connecting to public Wi-Fi is not as simple as selecting an open Wi-Fi, and can be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing. Instead, you must realize that there are safety factors that must be considered before you can proceed to merrily surf your way through the Internet. That does not mean, however, that if one follows the required safety procedures they must forego their journey through cyberspace. Additionally, to most of us using computers today, we are aware that the majority of these rules pertain to Microsoft Windows laptop computers, which are perpetually the target of hackers and, as a result, are known to be sieves when it comes to computer viruses and malware. However, just to be safe, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android users may also wish to follow some of these rules.

"

TNW: That’s a bit of a stark warning, but it would be reactionary to cancel accounts and leave social media en masse. What are the reasons for falling out with these platforms?

I gave up Facebook and it cheered me up enormously. More and more people say to me that they don’t like Facebook and they wish they weren’t on it, so there’s no reason why you can’t give it up. I’m not a Luddite though, I’m not suggesting we should give up all these networks, I’m suggesting though that we need to use them a little more carefully because at the moment, many of us are doing it in such a way as to reveal everything about ourselves, to turn ourselves inside out and lose something about what it is that makes us human.

"

— Andrew Keen: ‘I’m Not a Luddite’ (via thenextweb)

How to Remove Your Social Media from Google Search →

First you’ll need to copy the URL for your profile. Using my Twitter profile as an example, the link would look like this: https://twitter.com/c0z. Once you have the link you’ll need open Google’s Content Removal page — you may need to log in to Google services again when you get there. Click the Create new removal request button and paste the link. On the next page that loads, you’ll be able to remove cached content associated with the page you’re having removed. In order for Google to allow this, you’ll need to provide a piece of information that appears on the cached version but not the live version.

Outstanding reference.

"Facebook is being sued for $15 billion for tracking users, even after they have logged out of the social network, and violating federal wiretap laws. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is: Facebook faces nationwide class action tracking cookie lawsuit."

— Facebook hit with $15 billion class action user tracking lawsuit | ZDNet

mattgalligan:

UPDATE: In the comment section, Socialcam has stated that the pushed a “fix” for this. Because I’ve uninstalled the app and refuse to install it again, I can’t confirm that this is true, but I thought it important to point out.

Socialcam’s Shady Secret: I had a hunch that Socialcam was doing some really shady tactics to get more of a bump in engagement at the detriment of user experience. Looks like my hunch was right.

The app has been on quite the tear lately with how much it’s growing and getting insane engagement. It’s already been reported that they’ve been ingesting YouTube videos to get a further increase, but I found something even shadier. Turns out they don’t respect the user’s wishes to not broadcast what videos I watch to their Facebook feeds.

Every time someone watches a video on Socialcam it automatically publishes a story to their Facebook feed about the activity. Inside the app there’s a toggle to turn it off, but it turns out that’s not quite true. If you leave the app and come back, they turn it on again. To make matters worse, after a few seconds they replace the toggle with the Socialcam logo hiding the option to turn it off entirely.

Sure this might have given them a much higher level of engagement by the simple nature of publishing more activity to Facebook, but at what cost? They’re misleading their users in a giant way and should answer for this. I for one am deleting the app, but I’m only one of millions unfortunately.

Yikes. I was wondering why I was suddenly learning so much about the viewing habits of my Facebook “friends…”

Google may not be evil, but it's also not trustworthy →

An extremely fascinating lunchtime read.

It’s become impossible to ignore Google’s lengthening string of privacy and regulatory missteps. The company has been found by the Federal Communications Commission to have collected and kept emails and Web browsing histories, even passwords, of individuals whose Wi-Fi signals were intercepted by vehicles photographing street scenes for its Street View program. Google stands accused of lying about the practice and resisting a government investigation of the case.

The Mountain View, Calif., company appears to have deliberately bypassed privacy settings on the Safari browser loaded on every Apple iPad and iPhone, allowing it to secretly track the online behavior of the devices’ users. That could pose an especially big problem for Google, because in doing so it may have breached a settlement it had reached in a previous federal complaint by agreeing not to misrepresent its privacy practices in the future.

As if that wasn’t alarming enough, Google declared March 1 that it would aggregate the information it gleaned from each user’s activity on its search, mail, document and other services. The company’s argument was that this would allow it to personalize all those services for each user, but it also meant that Google would have more power to exploit users’ personal data than it had ever claimed before.

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theatlantic:

On Facebook, Your Privacy Is Your Friends’ Privacy

We tend to think about privacy in personal terms: my data, my personal information, my relationship with Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest. As our social networks grow and normalize, though, it’s increasingly more accurate to think about privacy as a communal affair, something heavily contextual and owned, collectively, by networks. Which means that privacy is something that all of us, as individuals and as a group, are responsible for.

Take Facebook. Aside from the standard, personalized privacy concerns — algorithms guessing your social security number, say, based on your profile information — there are also the concerns that expand with network effects. Photos, in particular, can reveal not only a user’s favorite places, vacation spots, and closest friends and family members, but also that same information for the other members of the user’s network. For those who have an interest, commercial or otherwise, in figuring out users’ identities and interests and overall persona on Facebook,  your data can reveal your friends’ data — and vice versa. 

Read more. [Image: João Paulo Pesce, Gustavo Rauber, Diego Las Casas, Virgílio Almeida]

I’ve been preaching this for years. If it’s shared with friends of friends, it’s shared with the world.

Who owns your files on Google Drive? →

The most damning information here:

Dropbox — terms can be found here:

“Your Stuff & Your Privacy: By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.”

Google Drive — terms can be found here:

“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).”

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thenextweb:

Facebook says that it will roll out the update to its ‘Download Your Information’ gradually, adding more data to it in the near future. The tool can be found in the Account Settings page of a user’s profile, existing as a way to hold a copy of exclusive information that may have been shared on the social network. (via Facebook Updates Download Your Information Tool For Users)

Good to know.

futurejournalismproject:

What If Your Emails Never Went to Gmail and Twitter Couldn’t See Your Tweets?

A new tool under development by Oregon State computer scientists could radically alter the way that communications work on the web. Privly is a sort of manifesto-in-code, a working argument for a more private, less permanent Internet. 

The system we have now gives all the power to the service providers. That seemed to be necessary, but Privly shows that it is not: Users could have a lot more power without giving up social networking. Just pointing that out is a valuable contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and come up with better ways of sharing and protecting ourselves online. 

“Companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook make you choose between modern technology and privacy. But the Privly developers know this to be false choice,” lead dev Sean McGregor says in the video below. “You can communicate through the site of your choosing without giving the host access to your content.”

Through browser extensions, Privly allows you to post to social networks and send email without letting those services see “into” your text. Instead, your actual words get encrypted and then routed to Privlys servers (or an eventual peer-to-peer network). What the social media site “sees” is merely a link that Privly expands in your browser into the full content. Of course, this requires that people who want to see your content also need Privly installed on their machines.

Read more.

Via theatlantic: