Attention: For Anyone Who Uses Facebook O.o

They changed their Terms of Service. It may well have no effect on the greater majority of people's lives... but it's kinda scary nonetheless!



I'm waiting for Microsoft to increase their original bid by 50% and try to buy Facebook again, lol...

D: Damn you, Facebook!! As if you don't steal half of my non-FFXI life away from me.....

Fun times.

In other words: "All of your photo belong to us."

Myspace is as worse, same goes with Gmail, Hotmail, etc... Not to mention all the EULA we daily accept when installing software, playing games. ToS we accept when purchasing stuff online...

The only way to protect your privacy online is to do stuff yourself. Wanna share videos/photos with friends ? Have your own webserver. Wanna exchange emails ? Make your own mail server. It's as simple as that, and you don't need to be a computer scientist if you wanna do that. Tons of guides/tutorials are available online. The only issue here would be your internet line (if your upload is slow), beside that, everything is possible :)

Gmail ToS for example :



Enjoy having your mail scanned by Google :d Very vague also, "for various purposes" / "other information related to your use of Gmail"...

And nobody worries about that, which is way more problematic than Facebook.

I don't know... considering the diversity of information circlulated on Facebook, it'd be a far riper market research tool than many others, even MySpace. Because of all the apps, the questionnaires, and the way it kinda forces a larger 'friend' group on you.

I'm no expert, I just thought it was interesting. Some people upload their personal artwork, concepts & ideas too, so perhaps if they're of any quality/originality it warrants extra caution. Also, sure it's a given that as soon as you sign on to the net you're giving things away that you're generally unaware of, but many people don't even realise that much. It just made me QQ with the Ninja editing of the ToS, and the clause that makes continued use after the change implied acceptance.

O.O yucky! So if I ever want to be done with Facebook (or my windows live space) I'll for sure just stop messing with them instead of actually closing my accounts. Even so they prolly look at them anyways. Does yahoo read my email, too? -_- darn those mail peoples!

So basically, closing your Facebook account should be a long process. You start by deleting most of your pictures, worse things first. Then log in periodically over the next 2-3 months. Then delete the rest of your pictures and and any post's. Periodically log in for another 3-4 months or longer. Start posting a bunch of random pictures and information not pertaining to yourself at all. Nothing bad of course. Change all of the personal information that you can. Proceed to log in periodically till its been over a year since you started deleting stuff. Now you can shut down ur account and they will save crap. lol

lol Tavlov! I like how you think.

A couple years ago the Homeland security w/e had some law where they were allowed to read emails. If there were "suspicions". Gmail was the only company that didn't hand them over forthwith. So yea, your mail could have been read.

lol Thanks Liela ^^

Nothing malevolent about that. Every email is automatically processed for spam detection anyway, and bear in mind Google makes a significant portion of their money off of advertising. They simply added in a section of code that provides relevant advertisements to the text in an email. Also, it's text ads, which is a lot less annoying than the ads you see with most webmail services. It's all done by computer, nobody's reading your emails. The rest is stuff most any web-based email service will do. Ads related to your IP? Cookies, which almost every website in existence uses. As for the other stuff they mention, believe me, if they weren't providing those services you'd be complaining a lot more. Take off the tinfoil hat, nothing to be scared of here...
As for Facebook, unless I missed something you can just delete all your stuff before you terminate your account and all they have is archives, no rights. Holding on to the archives is old news, somebody demonstrated over a year ago that even if you deleted your account they could still find your personal information through Facebook. I don't like that and I wish they'd change it, but I don't see such a drastic revision of Facebook's ToS happening in the user's favor in the forseeable future.
EDIT:

Every webmail service reads your email, but there's no cause to be paranoid about it. If they didn't, all those nasty spam emails that usually get filtered out before they even get to your inbox (most spam never reaches your spam folder, much less your inbox, these days) would clog up your inbox. Be glad there's a computer out there reading your email, or else set up your own webmail service and create your own spam filters.

-Not every email, every email you do not control. Because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's normal, keep that in mind. That's why people gets abused in the first place "oh yeah everyone is doing that". I'm sorry but when I use my own mail server to send my mail or use PGP to encrypt my emails, all that scanning doesn't exist or is completely useless.

-Still annoying, and the fact that they use my personal information to send me targeted advertising = do not want. Might as well install spyware on your computer after all, if you want to receive promotional offers according to website you visit, things you buy online etc...



-Which basically mean anyone can read them. "It's all done by computer" means nothing, behind each computer there's a man. Monitoring is there. If tomorrow a dude pays Google asking them to reveal that or that information about myself, Google will be in position to do that.

-That's just a pretext used by service providers to violate your privacy, nothing else. You can filter spam without scanning a whole email content, header would be already enough. Even if you disable spam filter, your email will still be scanned also...

The only way you're going to have absolute control over your email is to set up your own email server. That alone puts you above the average user in a) knowledge (I doubt the average user even realizes you can do that) and b) drive (even if they know the average user probably doesn't care/can't be bothered). Bandwidth might also be an issue, but I don't have my own server so I don't know. You use your own server? Good for you, you have absolute control over your email. I don't see the need, so I don't have one.
"Because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's normal"
Sorry, what? That's basically the definition of normal...
nor⋅mal [nawr-muhl]
–adjective
1. conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.
2. serving to establish a standard.


For all intents and purposes, cookies are legal spyware. D'oh. If you don't like it, block cookies when you can (something every user should do anyway, though some services require that you enable cookies) and dump your cookies and your temporary files from time to time. Hell, I have nothing to hide and I do it anyway. I don't like the ads either, but it's much less obtrusive that graphical advertising.


Anybody determined enough can read your mail regardless, through means legal and illegal. Anybody big enough to buy Google is big enough they could read my email if they really wanted to.


Explain please? I'm pretty sure you can be more thorough with a full scan, which means less spam reaching your inbox which means less complaining from the average user. Let's face it, less spam in the inbox = happier users.

I'll freely admit this stuff isn't my specialty, but some of this just makes sense to me. Go with the provided service and deal with possible privacy infringement, or set up your own server and put on the tinfoil hat.
EDIT: Forgot to state the obvious: if privacy really bugs you that badly, encryption ftw.

At least gmail is a lot more vigilant about your privacy. You shouldn't worry about much unless your doing something illegal anyways.

yeah, whoever takes the time to read my email is gonna be pretty damn bored lol.

Going to have a lot of lawsuits on their hands. Millions of people submitted data on the previous terms of service with the previous privacy policy, they can't just change their privacy ToS without warning and claim all the previous data submitted is theirs to use as they please, laws prevents them from doing so.

Real question is how many people would try to sue Facebook, lol.

There are some ppl who would lol if they need the money. Like the dude who got his pants lost at the dry cleaners and wanted 33 million for it. So its possible.

Frivolous lawsuits FTW!!

I don't think anything trumps the McDonalds hot coffee warning label incident.

For those who don't know, a woman sued McDonalds because she spilt hot coffee on herself and McDonalds did not have a warning label on the cup of coffee saying it was hot and potentially hazardous. The sad thing is; she won.

Knowledge wouldn't be an issue if everyone would have tried to do this since day 1. It's exactly like saying Linux is complicated and not meant to be used by the average dude. That's completely false. Making your own mail server following a simple step by step tutorial ain't really complicated. As for bandwidth, it can be an issue like I said, but well for emails it's ok. Soon enough everyone will have at least a decent DSL line which would enable anyone to make and run a home server.

That's how internet was supposed to be in the first place anyway, a decentralized network. And not the actual crap we have now, where everything is centralized on few servers in the world. When Google's down, can almost says that's internet's down, what the *** is that ? Same goes with facebook, myspace, etc... Your own page should be nowhere else but on your computer.



Knowing most of website forces you to accept cookies... So you gonna say : then don't use them ? Well I don't when I can, but just like I'm forced to use Windows for some application, I'll be forced to accept cookie in order to access some service.



-Well I'm saying Google, could be anyone in this example, Google ain't alone and you're not only giving private information to Google :p And still even if they're big, that doesn't make them legitimate.

-More thorough at the cost of my privacy, the problem is that service providers do not give the choice to the end user, by default everything will be scanned anyway, and as I said, even if you disable all form of remote spam filters, your incoming (and outgoing) emails will still be scanned. Most of people don't know that. Do you think they would allow anyone to open their RL mail and read it ? I'm not really sure. So why would they accept this for emails ? Why service provider try to hide this in their ToS instead of stating it clearly when you subscribe ? Why ToS are wall-of-text that nobody read ?

You know, about that...I remember talking to an ex-coworker of mine who had been going to law school at the time (dropped out for whatever reason, but they discussed it in some class or another) and he did make a good point for that case...namely that the coffee was like 160 degrees or some ***. I think it's HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE that she won millions of dollars for it, but she did receive 2nd and 3rd degree burns to her lap. Since then McDonalds has turned the heat down on their coffee...I don't know if you ever drank their coffee before hand, but I did and trust me, that ***was like molten lava, like 40 degrees hotter then your typical cup, I'd burned the ***out of myself a few times, too. Almost got into an accident once when it spilled all over my hand and I started swerving everywhere in agony...but that's my fault for drinking and driving

they have the label on the cups now though too, caution: Contents may be hot or something like that

I'm trying not to think of Ill Will Press with Foamy's rant about needing a cup to say the coffee is hot in 5982305 different languages. His idea was to simply show a person holding the cup while on fire; that would clearly symbolize that it was hot xD

lol...

Found a link about the Mcdonalds coffee case, interesting read...

But they didn't. You seem inspired, go educate the masses. No, really, I'd love it if the world actually understood the technology they're using. Linux *can* be complicated, and the DIY nature inherent to most *nix setups can drive even the savvy away at times.
Security issues for mail servers. Big companies are less likely to miss security holes than you are, and the odds of somebody trying to snoop in on you are roughly the same.


The Internet evolved. Evolve with it. Also, it's still highly decentralized. Most traffic never sees the upper server tiers. One of the 9 top-tier servers went down last year, nobody noticed. Google's down? OHNOEZICANTUSEGOOGLE!!! Please... Google is not the Internet. There are other search engines, and I doubt all of Google's going to go down at any point in the forseeable future. They have too many servers, one goes down another picks you up. Short of the largest case of industrial sabotage in history the most popular search engine isn't going to see global downtime. Also, you can access websites without going through Google.


I'll admit I reworded some stuff after i posted that last post, but I anticipated this and included it in the original post. Dump your cookies and temporary internet files on a regular basis.


Never said anything about legitmacy, except that information can be obtained through means legal and illegal. If you're worried about giving your information out to other groups... look, all I can tell you at that point is stick to the big guys, as they're less likely to be fraudulent, make sure the page didn't get hijacked (good luck with that... happens to the best of them), and if that's not good enough for you your only realistic option is to get off the Internet.


Again, the choice between privacy and ease of use. Short of blatant violation of privacy, the average user will always choose ease of use. Even the learned user will choose ease of use if they feel their privacy isn't being violated. I've already demonstrated that computers scanning your mail isn't that big a deal given that if I want your information and I have money and/or means I WILL get it, whether you like it or not. Again, encryption. Again, Google's way less likely to miss some small exploit that would allow access to your information. Also, if I want your emails why am I going to Google/Hotmail/Yahoo/whatever? If it's the govt they'll tap your line. If it's a private snooper they may or may not get in depending on the tools at their disposal and how strong your security is. If it's a company, ToS specifically says Google isn't going to sell your information.

This one sentence shows just how little you actually know. Up until that point I thought you knew what you were talking about.

Sorry to disappoint you Wood ^^; I forgot to post it, this is 'another' excerpt from the Facebook ToS:

Properly nasty bit of wordplay there, lol.

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