Facebook's Privacy Settings Very Un'friend'ly

"Soon someone is going to engineer a Twitter application that looks alot like the better parts of facebook. Facebook could be a part of that, but instead it looks like they're playing it like it's Us vs. Them, when in fact they're two different things."

An Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) application called "What Do Quizzes Really Know About You?" that EFF created through facebooks open-source developers software portal, which coincidently did not ask me to allow access, showed me that - via the one application I had previously given permissions to - the whole world knew more about me than I had intended.

So now with all the talk about the new privacy settings page - forced on facebook in part by the Canadian Privacy Commissioners dictate of July 2009 - I went back to facebook in order to block that applications access.

Here's a screen-shot of my facebook Privacy Settings - applications and websites page.






As you can see it tells me I haven't blocked any. But to find out what applications I have allowed access - and then to block them - was another matter. I just spent an hour trying to find that place, without success. When I dig through the maze and actually get it done I'll let you know - and show you how to do it in your settings.

If this is the way facebook thinks it can keep the data flowing, and thus continue the monetization of the site - namely through subterfuge, miss-information and misdirection, they are sorely mistaken. If I feel I'm being taken for a ride, I'll leave.

Twitter is a much more flexable application for social networking, the only thing it doesn't have that facebook has is that neat way you can paste an address into the text bar and up pops up a screen-shot in thumbnail. I like that. But Twitter applications like Seesmic have pop up windows too. Soon someone is going to engineer a Twitter application that looks alot like the better parts of facebook. Facebook could be a part of that, but instead it looks like they're playing it like it's Us vs. Them, when in fact they're two different things.

Good luck at working this through facebook, I hope this helps.



mh