Deleted Your Facebook Account? Think Again

Via BoingBoing - if you think that deleting your Facebook account makes it go away, think again.

Jason Calacanis deleted his, but it didn't disappear. The reason? If third-party sites like Twitter or YouTube make updates to your account within 14 days of you closing it, Facebook resets the process.

Hard to believe people are finally pushing back on this just because Facebook isn't doing what you think they're doing.

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EFF - Six Things to Know About Facebook Connections

Each time Facebook makes a change to their privacy practices, it pisses me off a little bit more.

So you can guess how infuriated I was when I learned about "Connections", and I immediately deleted several sections of my information.

But was it enough?

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, probably not.

1. Facebook will not let you share any of this information without using Connections.
2. Facebook will not respect your old privacy settings in this transition.
3. Facebook has removed your ability to restrict its use of this information.
4. Facebook will continue store and use your Connections even after you delete them.
5. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you "Like" something
6. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall.

Facebook, I've given it a shot, but the truth is, I'm just not that into you.

Full disclosure - I'm an EFF member and contributor.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

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Opt Out of Facebook's 'Instant Personalization'

Facebook is up to their old privacy tricks again.

This time the "feature" is Instant Personalization, a quaint moniker that fuzzes the fact that the sites you visit and interact with might suddenly be broadcast for everyone to see, even if you unselect the box to participate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation elaborates:

More specifically, these sites "may access any information you have made visible to Everyone ... as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages." On Monday, Facebook announced a transition where a "new type of Facebook Page" will make the "current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile" publicly available after you go through the transition tool (or those items will be deleted).

By default, the "Allow" checkbox for Instant Personalization is checked on your privacy settings. If you don't want the websites that you or your Facebook friends visit to know your information, you must opt out. Since this process is a bit complicated, we have made a quick video showing step by step how to do so.

Thankfully, EFF has put together a handy video that helps walk folks through not only opting out of this new feature, but specifically blocking the three applications that are currently participating.

The downside is that there's no easy way to automatically block new sites as they begin to participate, so bookmark the help page demonstrated in the video and check back from time to time in order to manually block additional apps as they come online.

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IKEA Gift Card Scam Snares Facebook Users

On a single day last week, 40,000 Facebook users fell victim to an online scam promising $1,000 IKEA gift cards.

In March of 2010, a similar scam took in more than 70,00 victims. Perhaps things in Farmville are too expensive?

Are Facebook users more naive than the general population, or are they so used to over-sharing everything that it's impossible for them to discern fact from fiction?

The lofty goal of those perpetrating these frauds is two-fold: steal your personal information for later use in identity theft, and direct you toward sites that surreptitiously install malicious software on your computer that captures your keystrokes, steals  your information, or becomes part of a massive botnet used to launch spam blizzards or churn out malware itself.

It's really a matter of Psychology 101 - giving people an incentive to engage in risky behavior and using human nature to help them make terrible choices. Remember the story of the trojan horse?

Don't accept friend requests from people that you don't know well. Don't mindlessly click on offers and links that people send you. And remember this scam advice that's been floating around as long as there's been fraud: if it looks to be too good to be true, it probably is.

Via Network World

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