Another update: Why does stuff keep happening on facebook always! I had to join back to be in the loop! GAH!

Update:




See what I did there?

‘facebook blue’ might not actually be a colour, but I feel it is the colour of investigatability after having read this article my friend Rahul sent me. My spell checker tells me “Dude, sounds like something you made up to the strains of a Who song!” (I stole that bit from House).

What happened?

According to the story a woman lost her medical-leave benefits because her apparently secure facebook profile was used as part of an investigation by her insurance provider. And this happened even when her profile view was limited to only those she approved.

I am an active Facebook user.

I have been an active user of facebook for a while now (since last year). After discovering the service I was lost in wonder and in awe of the service. I even went to the point of evangelizing it as much linux. But I didn’t know about the dark side to it back then. After all my friends moved over I started realizing that it wasn’t as cracked up as I thought it to be and I strove to break free. And then I found that while deactivating my account merely removed it from public view, facebook still held all my data in the backroom storage archive. Even their deactivation process is a joke. Logging back into the account reactivates it. There’s barely any difference. Except that as per their ToS, content from deactivated accounts is not shared as per the license that was granted to them when you posted that same content to facebook in the first place. So the only way to gain some measure of control was to quit the service and be an outsider. So, I did that a couple of times. And then I got tired of people saying, “Did you see what wrote on ’s wall?” or “I’ve posted pictures from ’s party. Check them out!”

And after having listened to the doubts expressed by a lot of people online, I actually took the time to go through their Terms of Service once and found that whatever users posted to facebook gave facebook the right to share the information with trusted third parties. This in essence meant that facebook could take anything that I gave them - status updates, photographs, notes and all other personal information (I haven’t read their privacy policy but I get an inkling that it’ll be a minefield of contradictions) - and possibly profit from it.

“We don’t just advertise.”

So, if you think about it, their only source of revenue needn’t be just advertising. It could also be allowing these ‘trusted’ third parties untrammelled access to the information that they need to do a background check or anything else they like.

I don’t feel secure on Facebook.

The answer to the security question has always swung like a pendulum weight for me. I alternate between extreme paranoia and extreme boredom and extreme recklessness when it comes to using the service. I have deleted my account numerous times and gone back only because one of my friends decided it was easier to post his photos to facebook rather than open an account with a service like picasa or flickr to post an album with 200 photos because all his friends could then see it.

Dear friends, have any of you ever heard of using a photo-sharing service like flickr and then posting links via twitter or even email!? Apparently not. I dislike having to do this each time, so I keep my account on facebook open. Sometimes, I think even of doing what Rahul does: to screw it all and not care.

Another possibility is that security on facebook is easier to circumvent than most people think. What with all these applications on there that a lot of people use - quizzes, games - could it be possible that third parties can create malicious applications designed to trick users into giving them their access credentials?

Or is it just possible that almost anybody who depends on facebook for their ‘social experience’ has a higher chance of having chosen an easy password that can be brute-forced quite easily?

Either way, there are problems with their security that need to be fixed as soon as possible. There have been too many stories of hacks appearing all over the place.

Should I pull the plug on social awareness?

Maybe it’s time I stopped chasing behind what my friends send me, and let people send me the content instead. Only email from now on and not HTML email. (Plaintext is the best.)

I wish there was some to get people back to using email and coding their web presences in HTML. Coincidentally I started learning HTML yesterday so that I could write my own website from scratch one day. More on that later. For now back to facebook.

It might not seem like it, being the nice, blue and friendly place to be with photos of your friends smiling back at you from all over the place. Any doubts that form are instantly quashed as you find yourself clicking and typing your way to the place where the foundation of all friendships are built.

fakebook. bah!