More Facebook Privacy breaches
I love it when Yahoo recycles old news stories. They did this one exactly one year ago.
I have to admit that I'm sick of these news stories making it look like all these privacy issues are Mark Zuckerberg's fault. It's not his fault. He's not selling the information. The fact is that anyone, even you or I, could make an app for Facebook and submit it. The people that make these apps are the ones nabbing the info and selling it. And as soon as the Facebook admins detect apps that do this, the app is shut down.
The best thing to do is to simply not put your SSN or credit card number on the site.
Just to touch a little more on the phishing thing, people often (mostly?) imagine phishing to be people setting up 'fake' websites that look like banks or facebook or gmail etc. - this is not the case! Many phishing sites pretend to be ordinary sites offering a 'free' service, that require people to sign up to use it, people sign up with their email and password - and many many users user the same email, and the same password for *all* sites they use.
People need to stop doing this, or the next 'free' website you sign up to could use your details to log into your email account, facebook, and potentially many other sites you use.
Just a quick reminder about password security ;-)
Oddly enough I just saw this on CNN in my college's cafeteria yesterday. Naturally the television it was on was set to mute and no one had bothered to turn on the captions… Point is though that CNN had titled this news as "Breaking Story" which I read and laughed at. How long have we been discussing Facebook privacy issues here? I know I have been hearing about said issues since before I even had a Facebook account.
I must agree with Kia that people really need to stop having one password they use for every website account they have: online banking, Facebook, e-mail, ect. It has got to be one of the easiest ways to compromise your identity and your privacy. Personally I use a 31 character alpha-numerical randomly generated password for my account that is used on no other websites (it is a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch to remember but worth the security). It might also be worth noting that, as an added bit of security, one might not wish to use the same username on different sites. It is easier to remember, but lets face it! We all probably use auto-fill now-a-days anyway.
∆
I've never used autofill, and whenever Firefox asks me if it wants me to remember passwords, I always say no. I also have different passwords for every website. Though I will admit, my username is the same on most sites, because that's how people know me.
I'm lazy. AutoFill is my savior.
Usernames aren't very important to change unless you don't want people to know you from other places ;)
∆
This story is from Wall Street Journal (although admittedly, via Yahoo!), and while it may be old news, privacy issues arising from social networking sites are still an ongoing topic, especially when it comes to Facebook. Facebook neglects to protect its users' privacy, and it has had a history of this. A year ago (last spring, I believe), Facebook was in hot-water over an earlier privacy breach. As for the disgracing of Mark Zuckerberg, it's common to "villainize" a household name, largely because it brings publicity to the story; these names would go in the headline, however. Zuckerberg was seldom mentioned in this article, other than in captions of pictures. Yes, I know it probably is not Mark Zuckerberg's fault alone. However, who is called to address Apple problems at press conferences? Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. So who is called to address Facebook problems? The CEO of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg. The CEOs get to handle the heat for their companies, even if it isn't their fault.
The best thing to do is put out as little personal information as possible, but also keep your login information safe. Hackers are looking to sell your identity:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/social_network/showArticle....
This is why the apps are under fire now.