Facebook's "Instant Personalization" aggregates User Data to Producers and Marketers

Your "In" as the default setting. Option "Out" button clearly pointed to - this time.

Librarian by Day's Bobbi L. Newman has already produced the quintessential 'How-to' for Facebook's most recent changes to your privacy settings.



Yesterday (April 22, 2010) she published:

"Protect Your Privacy Opt Out of Facebook’s New Instant Personalization – Yes You Have to Opt Out"

What's happening is Facebook is monetizing your data and your connections by making a machine that builds a map of your behavior and sells that customized data stream to the big players in content production and advertising.

I won't mention any brands here but you know, the big national advertisers and the networks and production houses that produce most television and motion picture - and government.

This is near the middle of the beginning of the end of the Internets age of innocence. :0

Or something.

Yuk!

TV gone - soon I'll have to buy a Linux OS, so I can block all this sh*t by default.


Read Write Web has a nice piece on this development, "The Facebook Backlash Has Begun..." Written by Mike Melanson, April 23, 2010.

It poo-poos all the hysteria about privacy - I agree.



Link to Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram Newsletter this month (April 15 2010): "Privacy and Control".


Bruce Schneier's take put into words better than I have been able to, my feelings on these issues. Privacy is what our parents did to protect themselves Schneier says. This generation understands that it is control of your information that counts now.

Laws that determine what authorities can and cannot use against you in court - and under what circumstances - are not yet well defined. But there is so much value in sharing your information online that people are willing to take the chance - that the data will get lost in all the volume (that time is disappearing) or by using aliases. This is folly, all you do online can be traced.

The issue is to control your information. To have control of your information you need to have a copy of it in your hands.- not in the 'cloud' - not on Google's server, or worse, not in the data sucking Facebook server.

No software that I am aware of collects all the writing, photos, recordings, links, programs PC users run into a data base of 'you'. Enterprise software has the technology. The open source movement needs to build a PC sized one -.a byte by byte back up of all your data default directed to an encrypted file.


One thing I noticed during the eastern seaboard power outage of 2003 - all your data is accessible to you - until it isn't. Shut down the major servers and the whole thing gets very unresponsive. Shut down all the power on the continent -- go get the fork turn it over - your info isn't yours anymore.



mh