Row over Facebook's Scrabulous
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A word game that has proved hugely popular with Facebook members could soon disappear.
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There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service. The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook? While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.) Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.  Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.) Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.  However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.  It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.  In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging and RSS.  So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.
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Nice N' Sleazy Facebook is suing a Canadian skin-flick firm for trying to hack into its website.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Facebook's safety controls and procedures are deficient and fail to properly protect minors from adult sexual predators in the company's social-networking site, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo charged Monday. Cuomo's office has sent Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter detailing preliminary findings of an investigation into Facebook's safety measures and requesting via a subpoena a series of company documents. The subpoena calls for Facebook to submit complaints it has received regarding inappropriate solicitation of underage users and inappropriate content on the site as well as any responses generated by the company. Facebook also has to produce all of its policies "on user safety and all representations made to consumers about the safety of the site," the attorney general's office said in a statement. Early results of the ongoing investigation reveal that the description of Facebook's safety measures is far from reality. In recent weeks, investigators from Cuomo's office posing on the site as minors have been repeatedly solicited by adult predators. The investigators were also able to access a wide range of pornographic images and videos. To add insult to injury, Facebook either didn't respond or responded slowly to complaints from the investigators posing as either harrassed minors or their parents, according to Cuomo's office. Facebook reacted in similar ways to complaints about inappropriate images displayed on the site. Overall, Cuomo takes issue with Facebook's assertion that its social-networking site is safe and suggests that Facebook may be in violation of New York laws for misleading public statements and advertising. Facebook said in a statement that it takes the concerns of Cuomo's office "very seriously" and that it is committed to working closely with all state attorneys general on safety matters. "As our service continues to grow so does our responsibility to our users to empower them with the tools necessary to communicate efficiently and safely. We strive to uphold our high standards for privacy on Facebook and are constantly working on processes and technologies that will further improve safety and user control on the site," the company said. U.S. state attorneys general are turning up the heat on Facebook, MySpace, and online social networks in general, concerned that sexual predators are using these sites to stalk and victimize minors while site operators do little to prevent this from happening. In May, News Corp.'sÂ MySpace agreed to provide attorneys general offices in all U.S. states with information it has gathered on convicted sex offenders who have used its social networking site. The decision followed a tussle between MySpace and the AG offices, several of which had complained MySpace had resisted sharing sex offender data with them.
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About face User protests have forced social network site Facebook to radically re-design its controversial News Feed feature, which critics argue is a Godsend for stalkers.â¦
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The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, apologises to users for the way it launched an adverts system.
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HSBC bank changes policy on charges after a student protest on Facebook.
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New Hampshire gears up for "Facebook" debates but not without some controversy, and AMD's succession plans have some concerned.
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Facebook's Beacon service, which shares information about users' purchases and video rentals, may violate the Video Privacy Protection Act, a law professor claims.
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Universal Music Group's recently filed lawsuit against MySpace.com has been generating some Internet speculation about the underlying reasons prompting the behemoth music publisher to go after the social-networking site.
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Three Fools chime in on the social-networking site's valuation.
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The launch of Facebook&#39;s Beacon advertising system in November put the social networking site in the middle of a controversy over privacy, as&#160;Beacon was criticized for being too aggressive and stealthy in collecting and broadcasting information about users&#39; activities online. For that reason, few people right now would probably envy the job of Chris Kelly, Facebook&#39;s chief privacy officer and the person most responsible for explaining the site&#39;s policies to the public.IDG News Service recently caught up with Kelly for a telephone interview. He answered questions about Beacon, saying the company is happy with it now after some revisions but acknowledging that the work isn&#39;t over, so we may yet see further modifications that address remaining privacy concerns.He also tackled other hot topics, such as the company&#39;s efforts to protect minors from sexual predators as well as&#160;data portability, or the ability for users to move their data between different social networking services. Kelly said Facebook is in favor of data portability in principle but wary of it in part because of concerns about user privacy. That might surprise the critics who raised red flags over Beacon, but Kelly said there are legitimate concerns about privacy --&#160;and security as well --&#160;with data portability.The following is an edited transcript of the conversation:IDGNS: There has been a lot of talk recently about data portability, specifically about letting users of social networks export their data to other sites and applications. What&#39;s your take on data portability?Chris Kelly: We&#39;ve made it clear that we don&#39;t have a philosophical problem with data portability. The problem comes in because there are all sorts of privacy and security worries [related to it], and there are a whole bunch of people out there who would gladly attempt to exploit somebody else&#39;s personal information if they could get one point of entry into a network, for instance, and try to export as much data as possible.So we want to make sure there are rules and controls around that to minimize the possibility of something going off. That is a critical part of all of the discussions, and it&#39;s something that, in a rush to call for data portability, most proponents haven&#39;t effectively considered. We&#39;re trying to make sure that everyone considers that. We joined the Data Portability Workgroup because we want to show that we&#39;re serious about having that conversation. But to just say that you can have a completely open system ignores that there are serious privacy and security challenges about that.IDGNS: So given the privacy, security, and legal considerations that need to be taken into account, is a satisfying solution to data portability even possible?Kelly: Any system needs to reflect the actual preferences of the end-user of the data, and the end possessor of the data is the data subject. At Facebook, we&#39;ve obviously invested a great deal in building a preference-capturing system around that, and any portability scheme needs to reflect that type of information. We&#39;ll press for any data portability scheme to reflect the preferences of data subjects. That&#39;s a very important part of building an effective data portability setup.IDGNS: What&#39;s your current position regarding Beacon, which has been such a big source of controversy?Kelly: We&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a point where it gives users control over the information they&#39;re bringing into Facebook from third-party Web sites and sharing with their friends. The users are coming to understand the technology better. As Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook&#39;s founder and CEO] has said, we made some mistakes in the launch, but we think we&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a very good point. We think users will have a great deal of comfort with how they share or don&#39;t share -- based on their own preferences -- actions on third-party Web sites off Facebook.IDGNS: Mark Zuckerberg has indicated in recent interviews that Facebook continues to work on and refine Beacon to further address lingering privacy concerns. Is that your understanding?Kelly: Yes, we learn a lot from user feedback and are constantly working to make the site more effective for our users.IDGNS: Could you articulate the importance of the bill that&#160;New York&#39;s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and state legislative leaders are pushing and that Facebook, among others, is backing?Kelly: It&#39;s very important because it allows us to have unique identifiers that focus on sex offenders that we want to exclude from our site. We&#39;ve been asking for this type of help from Attorney General Cuomo and some of the other attorneys general. State legislatures are listening right now and trying to make it required that when people register as sex offenders, they record any Internet and online IDs [they have] and to make it a crime to access the Internet using anything besides those identifiers. This is a big assistance to us because it lets us easily check if anybody is trying to sign up with those addresses.IDGNS: How effective is that, considering you can get an e-mail address anytime without any verification as to who you are? Isn&#39;t this a cat-and-mouse game?Kelly: This is where the social factor of Facebook&#39;s real-name culture comes in and the privacy controls that we have. Those are very effective in protecting people from those who might attempt to misrepresent themselves. But we also want to make sure that anyone who would do our users harm is easily excluded, and this bill will help with that quite a bit.IDGNS: How feasible is it to come up with a tool or technology that lets social-networking site operators verify people&#39;s ages, in particular to identify -- and thus more closely protect -- underage users?Kelly: You can have effective indicators of whether or not someone is actually a member of a community, like a high school. Facebook has always had technology to try to determine whether someone is a member of a network or not and has restricted access to their information based on that. That has a great effect in pushing towards a type of proxy age verification. It&#39;s not perfect, though, and a lot of the discussions of age verification have focused on attempting perfection in determining whether or not someone is of a certain age, and that type of perfection can&#39;t be legislated effectively.IDGNS: A couple of weeks ago, MySpace and almost all state attorneys general announced an initiative outlining safety guidelines for social networking sites. Is that something Facebook plans to sign on to?Kelly: That agreement substantially reflected an agreement we had previously reached with Attorney General Cuomo, and we&#39;re very glad that MySpace has stepped up in this effort. We think that going forward, there will be a variety of principles agreed upon among certain leading Internet sites.IDGNS: Is it fair to say that the relationship between U.S. state attorneys general and social networking companies has significantly improved in recent months? It used to be quite adversarial and contentious.Kelly: At Facebook, we&#39;ve always tried to maintain a very open and honest dialogue with all the attorneys general and law enforcement agencies, and I think we&#39;re getting to a very good point with these law enforcement agencies and the industry in a broader way.IDGNS: How realistic is it to expect a site like Facebook, which has about 60 million active users, to properly monitor what so many people are doing to prevent inappropriate or illegal behavior?Kelly: We use very sophisticated social designs in terms of limiting access to people&#39;s information based on networks that they share in their real-world lives, and further, we use technology to look for anomalous behavior, things that may be concerning. It helps to keep our users safer and also to prevent spam and to create a more comfortable environment for our users. We have a pretty large customer service team that deals with both reports and with the potentially anomalous behavior highlighted by the technology.IDGNS: Have you improved your response times when members report complaints about content or actions on the site? That seemed to be a big complaint Attorney General Cuomo&#39;s office had with Facebook at some point.Kelly: Yes, absolutely.IDGNS: Does Facebook do enough to make sure its average member understands how to manage the very granular privacy settings you offer?Kelly: I think the average Facebook user understands very well that we take privacy extraordinarily seriously. There&#39;s always a balance to be struck between the ease of use and completeness in providing privacy control. We try to strike that balance very well, but we always listen to user feedback about that in terms of how we give them more control over what information they share and with whom.IDGNS: How much monitoring do you do of, say, photos or videos uploaded to the site? Do those go through automated screening, or do you depend more on members manually flagging stuff they see?Kelly: Most of the automated tools we&#39;ve tested in terms of recognizing inappropriate images and things like that are ineffective. We&#39;ve found that users are some of the best reporters on that, and our reporting infrastructure is extraordinarily effective in removing inappropriate content quickly and in holding those users who attempt to post them responsible by cutting off their account.IDGNS: As chief privacy officer, what are some of your goals for this year?Kelly: As the site and the Internet as a whole evolve, we want to continue giving people a great deal of control over what personal information they share and with whom. We want to continue to reflect the social graph very accurately, and privacy is a critical part of that, so we&#39;ll continue to bake it into the design of the site and provide people with the most effective privacy controls on the Internet.
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InfoWorld - Facebook is suing seventeen people and a Canadian Internet porn company for allegedly trying to mine the popular social networking site for its users' personal details.
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When a popular blogger revealed that Facebook had banned his account, the Web erupted in speculative chatter. But where should they really be pointing fingers?
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Exploit code affecting an unpatched flaw in an image uploader used by both Facebook and MySpace is circulating publicly.
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The founders of a social networking website take legal action to try to shut down its rival, Facebook.
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Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network&#39;s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company&#39;s CEO said Wednesday.That Facebook doesn&#39;t let them do this today is &quot;a flaw in the system&quot; and something the company wants to fix, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.&quot;It&#39;s the users&#39; data. We want to [make it portable.] That&#39;s the goal,&quot; he said during a keynote speech in which he fielded questions from moderator and conference chair John Battelle and attendees.However, when pressed to provide a timetable for when Facebook might do this, Zuckerberg refrained from making a deadline commitment. &quot;I don&#39;t know,&quot; he said.The massive response from outside developers who have built, to date, about 6,000 applications for Facebook has been &quot;incredibly humbling,&quot; he said.Because&#160;Facebook chose to open up the platform&#160;at an early stage of its development, instead of refining the program internally for several years, the company is learning as it goes along, he said.That is partly the reason why the wording on the terms of service for developers may be read as giving too much power to Facebook over the third-party applications on its platform.However, Zuckerberg said Facebook isn&#39;t interested in &quot;yanking&quot; popular applications so that it can build them itself.While Facebook has to reserve the right to build whatever application it deems core to its social network, it doesn&#39;t plan to trample on its developers and steal their thunder.&quot;It wouldn&#39;t be good for us if we did that,&quot; he said.Opened to external developers in May, the platform is seen by many as containing well-designed tools and offering developers generous revenue opportunities, despite the terms of service language that Battelle highlighted and that has concerned developers who are investing time and money in creating Facebook applications.Still, Facebook has already had to step in and curb the behavior of some applications which, designed with self-promotion features intended to spur their adoption, annoyed users with unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays.Zuckerberg said it may take many years for the Facebook platform to reach a level of maturity, and in the meantime, the company will work hard to continually improve and refine it.He remained tight-lipped when asked about rumors that the company is in the latter stages of securing financing from a major Internet company, like Google or Microsoft.&quot;How&#39;s the financing going?&quot; Battelle asked him. &quot;Very well. We&#39;re almost all wrapped up,&quot; Zuckerberg answered, declining further comment.Facebook will likely more than double its staff of 300 to about 700 in the coming year, growth that Zuckerberg acknowledged is intense. Many of the new hires are referred by employees, he said.Asked if Facebook is contemplating hiring an experienced CEO to run the company, as fast-growing startups often do, Zuckerberg said that the focus is on &quot;developing a really good team,&quot; in part because there aren&#39;t many seasoned CEOs experienced in social networking.Zuckerberg also suggested that the company may be developing its own advertising platform, but declined to offer details, keeping mum when asked if the ad platform will syndicate ads outside of the Facebook site, thus becoming a potential competitor to networks from Google, Yahoo and others.Asked about the investigations from some U.S. attorneys general offices into Facebook&#39;s operations and policies regarding objectionable content and the presence of sexual predators among its members, Zuckerberg said the social network gives users very granular control over what data they share, how they share it and with whom.However, he acknowledged that he&#39;s not very familiar with how the company complies with civil and criminal investigation subpoenas.Founded in 2004, Facebook&#39;s popularity has been ballooning for the past year or so. Its user ranks have increased to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.&#160;