Facebook To Overhaul Data Use Policy

dryriver writes "The new Facebook advertising policy: 'Our goal is to deliver advertising and other commercial or sponsored content that is valuable to our users and advertisers. In order to help us do that, you agree to the following: You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us. This means, for example, that you permit a business or other entity to pay us to display your name and/or profile picture with your content or information, without any compensation to you. If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.' — Facebook also made it clear that the company can use photo recognition software to correctly identify people on the network. It said: 'We are able to suggest that your friend tag you in a picture by scanning and comparing your friend's pictures to information we've put together from your profile pictures and the other photos in which you've been tagged.' — It [Facebook] said it was also clarifying that some of that information reveals details about the device itself such as an IP address, operating system or – surprisingly – a mobile phone number. The Register has asked Facebook to clarify this point as it's not clear from the revised policy wording if a mobile number is scooped up without an individual's knowledge or as a result of it being previously submitted by that person to access some of the company's services. Importantly, Facebookers are not required to cough up their mobile phone number upon registering with the service. At time of writing, Facebook was yet to respond with comment."

Re:What The Fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never used Facebook exactly because of shit like this. I just don't get how it got so big and stays so big.

Your confusion, as you express above, can be alleviated simply by remembering that average I.Q. is 100.
That average is found at the peak of the "bell curve" which represents the distribution of I.Q. scores in
a population.

What you need to remember is this : half the population has an I.Q. of 100 or lower. This means that half the
population is not very smart, to express it in charitable terms. A lot of behavior which doesn't seem to "make
sense" can be therefore explained by the fact that a very large number of people are just plain idiots. And idiots
do idiotic things ( as Gomer Pyle might have said : "Shazam !" ).

Facebook is milking idiots. Facebook is used by idiots. That's really all there is to it. Well, except for this :

I own a smallish ( non Fortune 500 ) company. Part of the hiring process at my company involves finding out
if a prospective new hire uses Facebook. If they do use Facebook, they are not hired. Of course they are never
told that the reason they weren't hired is that they use Facebook, but there you have it. I have discovered too many
employees using Facebook on company time, and this is unacceptable. All such employees have been "weeded out"
( fired ) and we don't take on any new people of this sort.

~

Re:What The Fuck?

[Tippler]

You seem to be postulating that the use of Facebook is indicative of low intelligence. As a recent graduate of a top 20 medical school, I can confidently say that greater than 80 percent of my peers use Facebook. The percentage is similar in my residency program. Are you saying that hundreds of at least moderately intelligent people with the motivation to go through four years of college, four years of medical school, and 3 or more years of residency are not candidates for your company because we choose to occasionally interact via an electronic medium with which you are not comfortable? If your hiring practices are subject to such idiotic generalizations, then you will stay "smallish" or go bankrupt very quickly.

Re:ha!

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm talking about the more recent revelations [in.com] that came out this past June - regarding how the "friend finder" was slurping up information like your friends cell phone numbers etc. and storing that in shadow profiles (which got exposed because of the Facebook bug in their profile download tool).

The existence of Facebook and Google+ shadow profiles has indeed been known for a while.

Re:Thanks

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So, I'm in their system, despite being really well known as the paranoid "they're out to get me" guy to pretty much everyone who knows me.

And this is why privacy/data protection laws need to be updated to have far more teeth than they have today. When you have an organisation as influential as Facebook and it is actively encouraging other people to do things like providing your picture or your phone number with or without your knowledge or consent, any argument that some use of that data about you is permitted under their ToS has no weight if you're not a Facebook user yourself, but it seems clear that they're storing the data anyway. Actually, I'm not sure how that's not already illegal, at least within the EU, but the regulators don't seem in any hurry to take action and even if they do the penalties are little more than the change in Zuckerberg's pocket.

FWIW, I am similar to you, being well known among my friends as someone who doesn't want to share his personal details with Facebook. I feel sufficiently strongly about this that in the situation you described I would have made it very clear to my "friend" and his wife that I would no longer consider them friends if they thought it was funny to violate my privacy in that way, but then again I'm also confident that I would never have to go that far with anyone I consider a friend in the first place. I'm sorry if you're not always in such a happy position with the company you keep.