Drunk on Friday night? Then YOU probably DIDN'T spot Facebook's privacy tweak Facebook updated its privacy policy on Friday – a day traditionally chosen by politicians and football managers who are keen to bury bad news. While the planned tweakage was widely reported in November, the change came into effect on 30 January with little in the way of reaction from users [sorry, people] on the free-content …
It's a woman who has just found your secret porn stash and is holding it in her hands and with that disapproving look, she doesn't look best pleased...
It's a woman who has just been accused of releasing the worst bottom burp imaginable then denying the ability of the female anatomy of being capable of such horrors.
It's a woman who has been told to frown for a picture to be used by journalists in some attempt to reconcile her expression with a story, a bit like all those naff office pictures, the one's where everyone is happy and smiling at work.
Slightly unrelated to the story one must admit but as none of the other pictures on el reg these days make sense then I feel obliged to create an unrelated story behind it.
It's a woman who has just found your secret porn stash and is holding it in her hands and with that disapproving look, she doesn't look best pleased...
On a related note they keep using another photo, sorry don't have a link to it right now, of a woman with red-brown hair, hand up to her head on what appears to be a beach... it always looks strangely familiar. I tried a Google image search on it once and only found it on the stock image sites but I could swear I've seen the same model in the same location on one of the porn sites.
On a related note they keep using another photo, sorry don't have a link to it right now, of a woman with red-brown hair, hand up to her head on what appears to be a beach...
Found it, it's used on this article among plenty of others. I haven't been able to track down the "other" photos though.
We receive information about you and your activities on and off Facebook from third-party partners, such as information from a partner when we jointly offer services or from an advertiser about your experiences or interactions with them.
Plain English translation: "We will do as we damn well please."
"What do you have to block specifically to get all of them?"
If you have a dig* through the 'El Reg Redesign' in the El Reg matters forum someone posts exactly what to add to adblock to hide the pictures.
*And I do mean dig, the thread has more than a thousand comments,** hence I'm not looking for you.
**Mostly pleas to rollback the horrible redesign to Classic El Reg
> "Hamburg's privacy regulator "
> Not Germany's, Hamburg's. A privacy regulator per city! That's more like it!
Hamburg is one of the states which constitute the "Federal Repuplic"
Hamburg and Bremen draw this right from the old Hanse days, Berlin from... uh, somewhere else.
So it is one regulator per state.
iirc they only have consulting function anyway, so...
btw: this results in Hamburg using "HH" as a citycode on the numberplate ("Hansestadt Hamburg") while H went to the much smaller Hanover.
Per state. Hambug is a "Hanse" or trading city and a state in its own right, like Bremen and Berlin.
The problem in Germany is that Facebook cannot just change the T&Cs and opt everybody in. They have to allow every user to individually opt-in, if they want, or let them continue on the old conditions until the term of the "contract" between Facebook and the user runs out - Facebook not having defined a contract period means that they cannot force any user to ever change to new conditions.
There were big radio and television campaigns against Facebook in the last several weeks, urging users to delete their accounts before the 30th January deadline.
I was talking to one of my step-daughters on Saturday and she said that she and her sister have both deleted their accounts.
Me? I deleted mine back in 2009, when they became too big for their boots.
It looks like they're weaseling big time with all the variations of third-party, companies owned by, etc. The catch is, they still don't tell you want they do with the data, or how long it's held. I believe that the quote by Zuck in the last paragraph pretty much explains their policy. Maybe that should just be the policy: "If you use us and expect any privacy, you're a dumb fuck".
Simple, short, and to the point. Maybe the can let Google use it also.
It was only the East that had the big problems - as the archive in Berlin ably demonstrates. Parents, children, friends, colleagues etc. were set to spy on each other.
I have a friend who was a teach in the DDR before the wall fell. She made some comments about shortages in the shops again in the staff room and lost her job and was not allowed to teach children ever again...
The Staatssicherheit, or Stasi as it is "affectionately" known, also had spies in West Germany, who kept track of politicians and people with friends, relations or business contacts in the East.
It is for those reasons that modern Germans are very much against spying and one of the reasons why Facebook is currently being reviled in Germany and why Google often gets bad press here. The subject is very sensitive and it is one of the reasons why the German Data Protection Registrars are so active.
Can Germany be trusted with privacy?
Absolutely. You will actually struggle to find any other country who values privacy as much as Germany, in fact.
I love going there, the beer is good and the people are awesome (some can be a little stuffy until they get to know you, but that is the same anywhere).
As noted above, it's the part we gave to Russia that had the problems. You might want to blame Russian influence on the running of East Germany for that whole privacy clusterfuck. The German people who lived through that are still really sore about it, hence a unified Germany taking a pretty dim view of Panopticon style privacy policies ^^;
This post has been deleted by its author
I've already left but surely its ability to stalk others outweighs their ability to control what you see on the interwebs. Intelligent people will likely delete their profiles or don't have one. Which just leaves zuck with all the dumb fúcks... oh dear.
All the cool kids have gone to snapchat and whatsapp, it's probably why they bought them out. I'm getting to the point where I want to turn off broadband and wear a tin foil hat.
We as a species have evolved to the point where by we are actually manipulating our evolution.
Darwinism and the selfish gene are no longer the driving force. Ego and ignorance now control human evolution. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft et al. are the new selfish gene, the progenitors of a new evolution, imho a retrograde evolution.
Go enjoy and become the product, the victim, whilst you wave your e-penis/e-vagina at all those poor saps who's life is so empty that they are interested in your meaningless existence.
Now, there is nothing awesome about my existence either, there's nothing at all special about me. (my mother might disagree, but then mothers are like that) It's just that the general mentality of the human race makes me feel like an outsider.
Yeah, I read that bit, it comes right after:
Go enjoy and become the product, the victim, whilst you wave your e-penis/e-vagina at all those poor saps who's life is so empty that they are interested in your meaningless existence.
You can add "of course I'm nothing special" after that, but I'm afraid it doesn't stop you sounding like a pompous prick.
I'm not even sure I see what the problem is. They aren't doing anything that evil with them, just targeted advertising and making enough profit to run the service and have a fat wedge left over for Zuck. They don't appear to be selling the data as far as I'm aware, just targetting ads based on information I supplied. In the old days we used to pay for services, we still do pay for a BT phone line and mine still spews adverts at me if I plug a phone in. The question is, how many people would use social media if it cost £15/month just like their phone line? Probably very few. The next question therefore is whether you value what you perceive to be your privacy* more than this service? Personally I quite like the service Facebook provides - it means I'll never lose the contact info of my friends like in the old days no matter how long I leave it between calls. Unless they do something dumb like delete their account out of fear of "privacy issues" of course, then I'll likely lose contact with them and they will feel righteous because the three people they still contact are "close enough friends to stay in contact". Who needs occasional contact with old friends anyway, sentimental nonsense...
*realistically, your privacy is only compromised if someone other than you has access to data you didn't want them to. Nothing I've seen of Facebook suggests that this might be the case. My data is available to me and my friends only, and advertisers are able to leverage that data to target ads while crucially not actually being able to see that data.
They aren't doing anything that evil with them
As far as you know. That's actually the core problem: if they don't have your personal details then "repurposing" and "sharing with new friends" cannot happen by design or "by accident". If they have your details (and they do, thanks to a gaping hole in Data Protection laws that allows them to steal it off your friends), they can do whatever they want - you are not in a position to even *touch* them legally, and they can pretty much screw over your life by working out who your employer competes with and then sell them endorsements with your name on it (which they can, according to the policy that went live January 1st).
Do not *ever* make the mistake to assume there is any benign motive behind what companies do with your personal details. This is about control and money, and they have all the tools to fight as dirty as they want.
Until I see fines that make a difference, I am inclined to believe that the only way to fight is to be careful yourself to start with. And even then they can get to you - via your friends. Or did you think Facebook bought WhatsApp just to blow some loose change?
"That's actually the core problem: if they don't have your personal details then "repurposing" and "sharing with new friends""
But they also couldn't offer me their CORE service of sharing my information with MY friends.
Do not *ever* make the mistake of assuming that all the other people on the Internet agree with your massively paranoid opinion, or that all companies are somehow evil and out to get you. Sometimes they genuinely are just in it for the money. Facebook don't have any details about me which are not publicly available elsewhere, and there are very few evil things they can do with photos of my evening meal anyway. If I were in some top secret profession then perhaps I'd be a little bit more worried but please get some perspective about how valuable you and your data are for non monetary purposes.
All this change means is that I will get slightly more targeted advertising, making it more relevant to my life, and that those adverts will appear more consistently across platforms. The world will probably not end and my bank account is probably just as safe as yesterday.
Facebook don't have any details about me which are not publicly available elsewhere, and there are very few evil things they can do with photos of my evening meal anyway
Well, but that's your CHOICE. Most people are deceived into giving permission, and once they have it, the poor user gets to play a game of whack-a-mole if they ever want to turn back the clock. There is also the fact that, given enough data, you can prove anything by selectively choosing your framing (a pretty standard government and sales trick to massage statistics) - I hope you will never get into the position where someone needs leverage on you because you'll come to regret your "nothing to hide" life then.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
