Comments on: Technical rebuttal of Mark Zuckerberg’s rebuttal to Facebook TOS change

By: kent

kent — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:38:42 +0000

@betso: The security implications of assuming an IP address is the same person is dicey, at best. In fact, public computer terminals at colleges are a simple example where your personal information could be easily compromised if this is, in fact, how they are doing it.

You’re not paranoid, every company, large or small, when given power like this, goes to far.

There’s the saying by John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

The same applies to companies, of course.

Unfortunately, like Skype, eBay, and Facebook, the “Network Effect” of having so many people on a single platform doesn’t makes it very enticing to go elsewhere.

Personally, my own reaction is to play dead. I don’t post much on Facebook, and I use it less and less. It’s a nice way to keep in touch with people you probably wouldn’t keep in touch with anyway, and in general any communication that starts with Facebook I take off of Facebook as fast as I can to take them out of the loop.

Finally, I post personal content in places where I can control it. Start a blog by paying a host a paltry $5 a month and you get tons of disk, free software, and you can post your pictures to your hearts content. If your friends want to see what you’re up to, they can visit your site.

Maybe an open-source, free, self-hosted social networking solution is what we need.

By: betso

betso — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:33:52 +0000

Thank you for this opinion!
Even though they claim to have changed the policy and the procedure about deleting the accounts, it is still a pain doing it. Moreover, creating a new account from a machine (most probably due to the same IP) which was used for logging with another one resulted in… copying information from the unlogged account to the just created one. This happened today (07/21/2009)!
Not only causes this a bad taste in my mouth, it made information of the one user accessible to another, completely different person! And this is not compatible to what Zuckerberg claims!
Am I paranoid or Facebook went too far?
It is like Skype: I don’t wanna use it but there are so many people infected that it is difficult to stay away.
Is there any alternative you guys use?

By: kent

kent — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:03:06 +0000

@Aris: Thanks for the comment. If you know of the specific ruling, post it here and I'll add it to the article. Facebook does have the ability to delete your content, but apparently they are going to make you delete all content in your account, one by one.

By: Aris

Aris — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:02:04 +0000

Someone told me that a recent ruling states that you have the right to retrieve your content back from Facebook (you own it, not them); is this true, and if so, how does one do this?

By: coffee

coffee — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:03:38 +0000

the fact that Facebook change their TOS back so quickly is an indication that they knew they were wrong in the first place

By: Munchkin

Munchkin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:27:00 +0000

Couldn’t have been worded any better. Thank you for an EXCELLENT post. Well said, I hope well heeded by other Facebook users.

By: kent

kent — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:21:46 +0000

@Who Cares: Yes, you are technically correct. I think for “text messages” such as this, it makes the most sense, especially for distributed systems, or (in your case) when you do not want a message copy deleted upon account termination.

However, for “images”, “video”, and “audio”, this is likely not the case on Facebook, as replicating them everywhere would be a data explosion and makes no sense at all.

Finally, the point I’m trying to make is that it is possible, not that it occurs. Assuming that information you send to friends and others contains your ID, it is both possible (and reasonable) for Facebook to clean out your old data within a reasonable amount of time.

Thanks for your thoughts.

By: Darryl E. Clarke | Facebook’s New Policy: Bad News

Darryl E. Clarke | Facebook’s New Policy: Bad News — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:33:44 +0000

[...] Outrage is well documented throughout the blog-o-sphere. [...]

By: Who Cares

Who Cares — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:13:12 +0000

I can’t agree with your explanation of Facebook’s ability to delete a sent message after the originator left the site. I think it depends on how they implemented, which I am not familiar with.

I run a membership site and, for better or for worse, store only one message copy for both sender and the recipient. If sender deletes the message, it is just flagged for the sender as deleted, but it still exists, since recipient needs to see it, until she deletes it.

If the sender leaves the site, I do delete the message, but only as a measure of spam control, which means if someone gets thrown out, their messages go with them.

Just my 0.02

By: Web Content: The Facebook Content Controversy and What It Means for Artists | The Crafted Webmaster

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:03:24 +0000

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