privacy

In the wake of reports that suggested Facebook might be close to axing its controversial Beacon advertising program altogether, a company employee has come out and said that while changes to the application are imminent, it's not going away.

This follows a BusinessWeek report from Wednesday that indicated the program would be tweaked or even eliminated altogether.

Beacon, a component of Facebook's new "Social Ads" initiative, was assailed soon after its debut by leftist activist group MoveOn.org over what the group saw as grave privacy concerns. MoveOn stepped up its rhetoric earlier this week when … Read more

The Register is reporting that Facebook is on the verge of killing its ill-fated and ill-conceived Beacon product, the privacy thief that reports purchases made outside Facebook to users within the Facebook system.

Even creepier than that, however, is how Beacon extends personal purchasing decisions to a wide range of third-party marketers, as MSNBC reports:… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Restrictive tools and rash approaches to security challenges are endangering the health of the online ecosystem, an Oxford University researcher warned Wednesday.

Jonathan Zittrain, who has written a book due out in April called The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, gave a public talk on the issue Wednesday night at CNET's offices here. News.com hosted the talk--a first for our newsroom. The event, which drew 120 people, was sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You can call Zittrain's theme the AOL-ization of technology. Instead of personal computers being able to run any … Read more

Here's the lede from a Phoenix local news story: "CBS 5 Investigates discovered some Valley teachers making their private lives public by posting them on the Web."

Is it really a news flash to learn that recent college grads who are now teachers use MySpace? And that teachers have content on their MySpace pages that they don't want their first-graders to see?

Here comes the online networking generation gap, moving from college into the working world.

Most college students use online social networks, so most new teachers will have social network profiles. And yes, some of the MySpace and Facebook pages will still bear traces of sophomoric behavior on them, given that these new teachers are only a few years removed from being sophomores.

Am I concerned about this issue as a parent? Yes, of course, potentially. But this particular "investigation" looks like a low trick (or height of FARK) as the CBS 5 team decided to systematically snoop into teachers' pages. The news program says they "took a list of teachers who just started teaching in Arizona and searched for them one at a time on MySpace, checking to see which ones have profiles and what they might show."

What disturbs me most is that the CBS 5 story moves to the question of what kind of "higher standards" we hold teachers to and is more than willing to keep raising the bar to create wildly unrealistic standards of off-duty conduct. … Read more

The Internet has enabled the emergence of a collective consciousness that is unprecedented in human history. We are coming together as a hive, and the intelligence of the swarm is being mined and utilized like never before.

Knowledge is power, information is a cash commodity, and who decides how these resources and benefits are distributed? The latest controversy about Facebook's Beacon advertisements is one of many examples that suggests that the issue of user control over his or her own information is reaching a tipping point. We, the online masses, are developing a new sense that our own information is sacred and worth protecting, and not to be indiscriminately broadcast, or blindly exploited for someone else's commercial gain.

Beyond a "right to privacy" that might have meant "secrecy" in the past, we need to think about the right to control our information when it comes to:

I see these issues coming up time and time again in a thread that runs through everything from Internet safety, to social networking, creative artists' rights, consumer/patient rights, all the way up to government wiretapping and surveillance.… Read more

This story was updated at 2:36 PT to provide comment from Facebook and at 3:59 PT to provide further comment from MoveOn.

Is there more to the controversy surrounding Facebook's "Beacon" ads? MoveOn.org thinks so.

Last week, a feud began to brew between leftist activist group MoveOn.org and social-networking site Facebook concerning its "Beacon" advertisements, which broadcast information about users' activity on third-party partner sites to their friends' Facebook newsfeeds. According to MoveOn, it's a violation of user privacy because there's no way to universally opt out of Beacon … Read more

Someone lifts a few disks from the mail and voila! 40% of the population of Great Britain has their personal information laid bare. What information? Detailed information on families that receive government financial benefits for children, including information on nearly every single child under the age of 16.

Forget about privacy online. We seem to have a problem with privacy offline, too:

The British government struggled Wednesday to explain its loss of computer disks containing detailed personal information on 25 million Britons, including an unknown number of bank account identifiers, in what analysts described as potentially the most significant privacy breach of the digital era....… Read more

Wow. Just when you think Facebook is truly your "friend" you find out that it's spying on you and reporting your activities to your other "friends." The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is tracking user activities outside of Facebook and reporting that activity to that user's friends within Facebook.

Creepy, indeed.

The social-networking service earlier this month began posting updates about users' activities on Web sites outside of Facebook and on commercial pages within Facebook -- in some cases, alongside ads from the companies behind those Web sites or pages. Facebook is posting users' photos alongside certain advertisements, another feature that has alarmed some privacy advocates and users.… Read more

This post was updated at 8:03 PM PT to provide additional comment from MoveOn.org.

Facebook issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon in response to online activist group MoveOn.org's charge that its "Beacon" advertising program is a violation of users' privacy.

"We encourage feedback from our users on new products," the Facebook statement read, "but in this case, the MoveOn.org-led group misrepresents how Facebook Beacon works. Beacon gives users an easy way to share relevant information from other sites with their friends on Facebook."

Beacon, which is part of Facebook'… Read more