On 15 February 2010 11:00, Greg Keogh <[email protected]> wrote: > Fair enough I suppose, since the whole idea of these sorts of sites is to > make money, I guess I’d do the same thing. But now the security dangers and > ethical problems become obvious. If they’re not doing this already, I > imagine you could search the whole of Facebook looking for things like > popular toys, books, music, political issues, etc and derive trends and > stats upon how often they are mentioned by different age groups. This sort > of information could be priceless. The technical aspects of this data > trawling, parsing and collation would be fascinating. > > Oh well, I suppose this is just a symptom of the new money-grubbing > globalised century we live in. > That's a fairly glass-half-empty view of FB, Greg. :) They do provide the service for free and so the reality is that they have to make a coin somewhere.
The main problem I have with FB privacy is that they have tried to set privacy policies in the past where they have effectively claimed that they own all of your content forever, even if you leave the site, and that they can license it to third parties as they see fit. Stop and think about the implications of that for a second. You might send a photo of your kids playing in the bath to your siblings - but somewhere along the line you've granted perpetual rights of use to naked pictures of your children to some company in the US. :| Of course, you can't *actually* delete an FB account. You can close it and it will give you a message to the effect that they're keeping the data and you can reactivate your account any time you want. On the other hand, the service is pretty good and pretty reliable compared to the complexity of what it delivers (i.e. it operates at a pretty massive scale and yet, say, Twitter, can't stay up just storing 160 byte strings). As it stands, FB is really the only medium out there at the moment for effortlessly sharing content between close family and friends *securely* (at least that is the perception anyway). David. -- David Connors ([email protected]) Software Engineer Codify Pty Ltd - www.codify.com Phone: +61 (7) 3210 6268 | Facsimile: +61 (7) 3210 6269 | Mobile: +61 417 189 363 V-Card: https://www.codify.com/cards/davidconnors Address Info: https://www.codify.com/contact
