Making the world ‘more open and connected’
p2pnet news view P2P | Advertising:- “It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected.”
Who says?
Mark Zuckerberg, the guy behind Social advertising company Fa$ebook.
Seeing the phrase “open and connected” in the same sentence as Mark Zuckerberg is a sharp contradiction in terms. But Hey! The lamescream press corpse will snap this up and run with it as though Fa$ebook statements are credible.
In an open letter, “we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information,” he says, the truth being the exact opposite.
“Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.”
However, to the contrary, from day one, Zuckerberg and his cohorts had done everything they can to improperly gain exclusive control of private and personal user data, ending up in pitched online battles with users who believe they, and what they do and where they go online, is their business, not information to be sneakily and freely used by Fa$ebook for shady marketing and advertising purposes.
“A class action lawsuit … targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network,” said CNET News last year, continuing, “The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday.
“Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.”
Now Fa$ebook is facing another class action lawsuit, “this time from users who say they were scammed by misleading ads that show up in Facebook-sponsored games,” says Consumer Affairs . “Also named as a defendant is Zynga, the video game developer that provides the bulk of games featured on Facebook.
“The plaintiffs say they were duped into handing over personal information in exchange for ‘cash’ that could be redeemed while playing games like ‘Mafia Wars’ and “Farmville’.”
Zuckerberg goes on in his ‘open’ letter >>>
Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.
Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.
However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.
The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.
Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.
We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.
Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.
Riiiight.
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
CNET News -Class action suit means Facebook’s Beacon just won’t go away, August 14, 2008
Consumer Affairs – Suit Says Facebook Scammed Gamers Out of Information, Cash, November 19, 2009
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