I don’t subscribe to MySpace, Facebook, Friends Reunited or most other similar sites. Why? Because you are putting a huge amount of information about yourself in someone else’s hands. That someone else may not just be your friends, it could be the site administrators or possibly even complete strangers.
Just today at work, hundreds of Facebook users are being shown the inboxes of other users. It appears to be some kind of web caching issue caused by recent updates to Facebook. This is a huge breach of the privacy of each Facebook user affected. Fortunately it doesn’t show the contents of other pages, just the inbox but that’s still a big deal.
I’ll keep to keeping to myself thanks!
3 Comments
Does this not count?
http://www.linkedin.com/in/simonsteele
David
Agreed, which is why I was careful to say “most other”!
In general I think linkedin has some potential issues here too, but they are far less scary to me than the kind of information people have on Facebook being leaked. LinkedIn is a fairly controlled publication of information - pretty much like an online CV. I’m personally not too worried about that information being viewed by others.
Ah so it doesn’t matter because you might get a new job through linked in. I think the view is some what similar for facebook/etc. “It doesn’t matter because I might get sex.”
Or is that just my sceptical (and male) view on the way these things work?
David