I’m wondering if as I read in this comment on a RWW’s post there is a legal breach of contract, and if then what should happen?
1. I mean users could just leave if they are not happy.
2. It’s legally abiding not to change the contract and thus FB has a legal responsibility to keep the same contract for the users who signed in on the former terms of service.

I don’t know how it works, but I do know that cell phone companies do change some terms in their agreement (higher prices usually), but not others (lowering your minutes for ex).

I don’t know the law actually. So any hint?

thanks!

The real question that is being ignored in relation to FB’s changes is the blatant breach of contract involved in soliciting personal information about people’s lives (which is what makes FB work) under one privacy guarantee, and then simply “deciding” that it is acceptable to breach that guarantee and make information more available unless the user takes positive action. A contract, such as is formed by signing up under one privacy guarantee, and disclosing information based on that guarantee, represents a meeting of the minds of BOTH parties, not just one of them. FB, or any other company, is free to solicit the disclosure of personal information from NEW customers under any policy that it believes that customers will now accept. If Zuckerburg wants to do that, it is just fine. But to obtain the information under one guarantee, and then change the privacy policy and apply it to information gathered under a different guarantee is no less FRAUD than if it gathered information under one pretext, and then just released it. The difference is only in amount, not in kind. This is especially true when anything that FB makes publicly available (unless a customer relying on the old privacy policy takes a timely positive action) may be indexed by search engines and permanently cached outside the control of FB and the customer. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

There are more than 20 distributed open social networks in work-in-progress (http://www.reddit.com/tb/c3ynt), will such a large amount of project succeed in overcoming our Social Inertia as defined below?

Social inertia consists of people who have given in to social inertia. When you surrender to social inertia, you become part of the pressure it exerts on others; when you resist it, you reduce it. We conquer social inertia by identifying it, and resolving not to be part of it.Read more at www.gnu.org

A little bit old news, but nice to see the experiment in action. It should work with Google aswell, by targetting some specific word like the name of the HR coordinator, or some specific terms linked to the company (like some research field, or some potential markets etc.).

I’m sure it should work again even if it’s 2 years old news…

Use Facebook Ads to Make Employers Hunt You Down

More and more employers are trying to leverage Facebook to find great entry-level talent, but not many are doing a good job. We offer consulting services to help them do that, but we have much more fun helping job seekers. I recently came up with the idea of reversing the roles. Instead of helping employers target students with recruitment messages, why not help students/new grads target employers with Facebook ads?

Basically, we want you to create an ad for yourself. The goal is to sell yourself in a few short sentences and convince any recruiters who may see your ads to click through to your resume/web page/contact information.

1. The most successful students were those who targeted a single company with a very specific ad that mentioned the company’s name in the text.

5. Most people are too lazy to take the initiative to do something like this. We told 40+ people about the experiment, 16 said that they would take part, and only 5 actually went through with it. Just because the method is now public doesn’t mean that it won’t continue to be effective.

6. Closing the deal is still important. A technique like the one that we have described will start a conversation with employers, but you need to be able to sell yourself in both informal and formal communications to actually land the job. Nobody is going to hire you just because they saw your ad. Read more at www.onedayonejob.com

I work at SAS and actually saw Laura’s add almost every time I logged in for about 2 weeks or so. In fact, it started to stand out just because of its frequency and the fact that it was targeting SAS. But to be honest, I just figured that it was some generic ad that said “I want to work at _____” and that Facebook was just filling in the blank and using the company of the current user. I think these type of ads could definitely garner more clicks if there was some sort of “authenticity” guarantee, if that makes sense. So many of the ads we see nowadays are custom targeted automatically using information about the user’s interaction with a site (think of all those obnoxious ads that target location using IP address). I definitely would have clicked through and engaged in the process if I had known she was targeting SAS specifically (however I couldn’t get her a job doing the things she wants to do). Read more at www.onedayonejob.com

Can you please give me feedback on this Step by step: Get your #privacy back on #Facebook - #InstantPersonalization” and #”Friends, Tags and Connections” http://bit.ly/privacyback . Is anything missing? Is it too confusing?

Thanks!

Facebook has just changed AGAIN the privacy settings. I’m not talking about the Instant Personalization option which was rolled in April 21st, but a slight change in the privacy menu http://bit.ly/facebookprivacymenu and specifically with the new sub-menu Friends Tags and connections. I will try to change later the screenshots to reflect that change

1. First today’s “magical and revolutionary product”, the  ”Instant personalization” “feature”: Instant personalization allows other websites to access your profile. If you want to cancel that function here is what you should do, go to http://bit.ly/instantpersonalization and uncheck the box.

2. Applications & Websites privacy option:

http://bit.ly/applicationswebsites

3. The general privacy settings:

http://bit.ly/privacypersonal :

4. The search settings:

http://bit.ly/searchprivacy

if you don’t want to end-up like this poor girl

6. Update on April 29th: The new Friends, Tags and Connections Privacy sub-menu:

the new Friends, Tags and Connections Facebook settings that controls the tags you get and the new “like” button on partners websites http://bit.ly/friendstags:

See more at livinglifelive.blogspot.com

Nothing to add but highlight again this suggestion from the Senators: “Providing opt-in mechanisms for information sharing instead of expecting users to go through long and complicated opt-out processes is a critical step.”

Would Facebook listen one day?

“In the meantime, we believe Facebook can take swift and productive steps to alleviate the concerns of its users,” they wrote. “Providing opt-in mechanisms for information sharing instead of expecting users to go through long and complicated opt-out processes is a critical step.”

Senators tell Facebook: tighten privacy policy

changes in its privacy policy that would allow personal information to be viewed by more than friends, and options on other websites that would allow third parties to save information about Facebook users and friends.

Senators Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken objected to changes that made a user’s current city, hometown, likes, interests and friends publicly available, where they were previously only seen by friends.

FTC spokeswoman Claudia Bourne Farrell said in a telephone call that the agency planned “to develop a framework that social networks and others will use to guide their data collection, use and sharing practices.”

“These sites provide a valuable service to users by keeping them connected with friends and family and reconnecting them with long-lost friends and colleagues,” Schumer wrote. “But the growth of these sites over the last several years demands we provide guidelines on how private information submitted by users is shared and disseminated.” Read more at www.washingtonpost.com

I love the “feature for data trade” this article refers to and our complacency to accept to put our privacy in the trade.

This article about a long time user having to create a new Facebook account and the parallel he makes between the old privacy and the new one shows exactly toward what Facebook (the whole market?) is going is thought provoking. Specifically talking about our responsibility as a user and our will to get stuff free and give the only free and priceless thing we have: our privacy!

No conspiracy theory here: just plain and stupid trade of “free” stuff for “free” stuff.

increasingly prevalent ‘features for data’ trade we are becoming more comfortable with. It can only make us more complacent about our own privacy.

I must point out that I’m not accusing Facebook of any evil-doing, or breaking any laws. These examples are here to illustrate what I think is a clear direction in our use of the free (as in beer) web, and our relationships with companies like Facebook and Google where our activity has become both product and payment.

The greatest threat to our privacy is our own complacency over it. We want features, we want them for free, and we’re increasing willing to hand over whatever data is required to access them. What worries me is not what companies are doing with this data now, and not even what they might do with it in future; what worries me is how this creep is discreetly changing our behaviour such that we [as a society] no longer even care about our privacy.

Geolocation is clearly the next thing for us to get complacent about, and personal data doesn’t get much more personal than your physical locationRead more at web.2point1.com