Facebook in not protecting people's privacy shocker.

For all the positive benefits users of facebook speak of, arranging overconsumption of alcohol, recording and sharing pictures of your overconsumption and helping employers decide if your alcohol consumption matches up with their corporate ethos, we all know that really all it exists to do is to get as much of your personal information as possible so as to sell it off. Kind of like how people often don't like to say they're going to the toilet but instead use a euphemism (which can be more vulgar than the truth but w/e) the general populace likes to pretend Facebook actually cares about you and your views instead of just a fungible data node. Ya know, like with shop loyalty cards.

A couple interesting privacy issues that have come up of late: The new Groups "security" feature is easily exploitable and far from under the control of the group creators. Oh and thanks to an indifference to personal privacy on the part of both Apple and Google your phone number is probably easily available on facebook even if you didn't put it there.

why yes it is ironic I am posting about this stuff on a google owned blog

Google Engineer had access to pretty much any personal info he wanted...

...used it to taunt children. He doesn't seem to be a paedo or anthing he just liked showing off how much data he could access by bullying young teenagers. Probably the more worrying aspect about this given how apparently IT people in any company have access to huge amounts of data wherever they work, Google just has more than most (posted on a google owned blog - Tony), is that Google took 4 months to realise this was going on and then made their investigations increasingly opaque to the families of the children involved and the wider world.

Random tangent; for some reason this lead to discussion of Roz Ho who is pretty bad at her job in that she has lost Microsoft literally billions of dollars. So here is a fun compare and contrast activity, search both Google and bing for just her name:
Google
bing

Oddly it seems Bing can't find any articles critical of Ms Ho.

thanks tony

Those who have nothing to hide in their homes and vehicles have nothing to fear

So those full body scans they're rolling out to airports? Yeah they've got roving versions of those vans that can scan vehicles and homes on any street.

Can't wait for the 5-4 / 6-3 (KAGAN HATE TERRORISMISTS!) decision on this kind of thing not requiring a warrant.

thanks jonny

EDIT: Actually turns out the supreme court have already ruled this kind of thing is a search under the fourth amendment (thus requiring a warrant) from the comments:

The Supreme Court already ruled on this issue in KYLLO V. UNITED STATES. It ruled that “…the use of a thermal-imaging device aimed at a private home from a public street to detect relative amounts of heat within the home constitutes a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.” The ruling details may other relevant and obvious reasons this technology is illegal.

Read the ruling here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-8508.ZO.html

Sadly, the agencies who invade our privacy will no doubt hide behind National Security to further erode what once made this nation free.

The commenter is of course right, this ruling will be ignored thanks to the War on Terror or what have you.