Category: privacy

Gossipy Facebook

I’ve been getting these emails occasionally from FaceBook over the past few months, and been deleting them, but…I think the whole concept of this email is wrong (and misspelled – gossips?!?!):

Do you know any gossips about your friends? Your other friends may want to hear it.

(Gossip is always anonymous, never appears in notifications, feeds or anywhere else where the author could be identified.)

 *list of friends names*

To check out gossip about you, or other friends not listed here, click here

What the Social Profile application wants you to do is post anonymous, possibly untrue information about friends and acquaintances, and allow others to see that.
Surely there’s some issues here with libel? If anyone can ‘publish’ unsubstantiated information about others, under the guarantee that it’ll never be traced back to them, which Facebook will then distribute around its system?

Hell, maybe I’ll start posting anonymously about affairs friends have had, bodies they’ve buried, crimes they’ve committed…all untrue of course, but hey, it’s anonymous, what’s to stop me?

And, Facebook’s changed their layout – it’s gonna take me ages to get used to this, gah!

Google StreetView – coming to a city near you…or Edinburgh

So, last week, there I was, slumped in a bus seat with a vacant look (as usual), when I spotted something odd coming out of a side street.
A wee black car…with a huge pole on top, covered with cameras.
Now, it’s coming up for Festival season in Edinburgh, when all sorts of strangeness occurs on a regular basis, and therefore such randomness would blend right in, but this was a tad too early.
Aha – it turned a corner, and I clocked the discrete little Google StreetView logo on its side.
Since then, I know it’s been into the cul-de-sac where I live (but not got my flat as it’s on the wrong side to be seen from the street), and continues to travel through Edinburgh.

Now, I know there’s debate over privacy issues (which, to be honest, I think are hugely overblown by the paranoid), but I personally think it’s kinda cool!
The usefulness of a walk-through map of a city, with actual images of the physical, ‘real’ landmarks and what they look like far outweighs the possibility of someone, somewhere being spotted doing something they shouldn’t be doing, or being somewhere they shouldn’t be.

So, when they launch it for Edinburgh, I’ll be the one with the disturbingly red hair on the top deck of the number 25 on Leith Walk….with the blurred out face 😀

Turning off Beacon

So, as I continue to get pop-ups on Kongregate asking if it’s ok to publish what games I’m playing in my Facebook feed, I decided to try and find out how to turn off Beacon…which I didn’t even know was turned on. It seems to only be doing this because Kongregate is an American partner site.

It’s in there, in the Privacy settings. If you want to do this too, go to:

Privacy >
News Feed and Mini Feeds >
Actions on External Websites >
Tick box marked “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile.”

Save changes.

I did NOT like that!

So, I was sent a link to a fun game, Chronotron.
I was playing away, getting past versions of myself to work out puzzles, when a little pop-up appeared on the bottom right of my screen, saying that Beacon was telling my friends I was playing Chronotron on Kongregate, before sliding back into obscurity.
So I went over to Facebook, and sure enough, that information had appeared in my profile!

This is my first encounter with Beacon, and needless to say, I don’t think my friends want to know when I’m playing a game on a totally separate website, so I disabled it immediately.
But I didn’t know that Beacon was activated, or affected UK users? Maybe I need to find out more about it, as who knows what else it’ll be informing my friends I’m doing on other websites!