Facebook Suspends Personal Data-Sharing Feature 140
Suki I writes "Facebook has 'temporarily disabled' a controversial feature that allowed developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users. The social network suspended the feature, introduced on Friday, after only three days. The decision follows feedback from users that the sharing-of-data process wasn't clearly explained and criticism from security firms that the feature was ripe for abuse."
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad decision. I hope they reverse it. (Score:5, Insightful)
As an applications developer, lacking this feature means that I cannot increase my budget to hire more programmers and produce a better product. Without the personal information I have nothing to sell to advertisers, and must rely on much lower advertisement rates and donations from users.
Users will suffer from lower-quality apps, and I'm sad that Facebook has taken this step. In a world of openness, this is a huge step backwards.
I don't want to go back to a "pay to play" internet. Please lobby FB to reenable these features if you also believe in keeping the internet free.
This would be more convincing if there were any quality Facebook apps in existence. Don't worry, though. No lobbying is necessary. As always, Facebook will quietly re-enable the identity theft features as soon as the public's attention drifts elsewhere. Then you can get back to chipping away at privacy for the sake of profit.
Meanwhile (Score:5, Insightful)
3 days was enough for most of the big apps to collect most of the data from the nearly entire userbase.
Facebook's Unified Messaging (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider again Facebook's recent proposal that they become the new unified messaging service. Every email, text and IM goes through them.
And consider again how many times Facebook opens up private data and hands it out.
I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it so hard for people to understand that with Facebook and other so called free stuff that they are the product that is being sold.
Re:Meanwhile (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what I was thinking. Three days is an eternity to have such things like that open. Harvesting the data has already occurred and cannot be "undone."
Still, people stupid enough to put that information in there ALMOST deserve to have it exploited. I say almost because "ignorance/stupidity" is not a valid excuse for exploiting people. Children are ignorant and stupid and yet we have laws that say it is rape to have sex with them simply because they aren't capable of making a good and informed decision about whether or not it is good for them. So clearly, at some level, we recognize that ignorant and stupid people need to be PROTECTED from exploitation and I don't think age should be the only factor worthy of consideration.
And this is why I don't belong to Facebook. (Score:5, Insightful)
If there was an open-sourced not-for-profit social network that had no ads and worked to ensure privacy, I'd consider joining that, and donating to it.
Otherwise, you're at the vendor's mercy. And like they say, there's a zucker born every minute.
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Seems to be the way of it (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like this is how Facebook continues to do it. Expose the users without telling them that they're going to do it, wait for the backlash. If there's enough, backpedal on the decision. But only after giving the parties interested in the data plenty of time to mine a ton of it, making the reversal pretty much pointless.
Well played, Facebook. Yet another example of why you don't post anything on the Internet that you don't want known publicly.
interesting to see how this plays out (Score:4, Insightful)
not just this one issue, but this and all future attempts at exploiting user information. because facebook has the interesting quandry that it makes more money the more it exploits user information. but it drives criticism of facebook when it does this
the interesting part comes when you ask exactly how much people care about this, or if it is only a vocal minority. i've noticed more media attention to the issue, but again, that doesn't necessarily translate into anger amongst the common user
my personal feeling is that facebook will go the way of myspace, friendster, angelfire, geocities, etc... that social networking is just naturally cyclical. like the in club in the city for a couple of years goes belly up, to be replaced by some other in club somewhere else in the city, in endless repetition. however, i could be wrong, and facebook could have some sort of permanent lock on social networking. we'll see