I found out about this quiz from American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on This Week in Tech (TWiT) and thought sharing this information is important. This quiz (yep, its a quiz to demonstrate how harmful they can be) tells you the data accessible to third party applications when you give these small quizzes. Worst part about this is, you do not just give your information but also provide information about all your friends. Even all the private information like political view, birth year, preferences, current location about your friends is accessible to these third party applications. To prove the point ACLU displays some information as you can see on the screenshot below.

As you notice private information about my friends is accessible to them and these third parties can be anyone, not have to be a reputable organization. That’s why These quizzes should be avoided. Even Facebook does not have control (as of now) on how this information can be used/misused.

Update: here is an article on how to secure some of your data after recent FB policy changes.

Update:
Facebook has added the privacy settings option so one can select what his/her friends can share about him/her. This setting can be found under ‘Privacy settings > Applications and Website > What your friends can share about you‘

Earlier this year I did a podcast on Facebook platform and why it is attractive. But since then I am losing interest in Facebook’s capabilities and thus this blog post. In that podcast we discussed how Facebook connect/Google connect are going to be used as openIDs and would help build communities around  external sites. Those things have not changed but my understanding of social communication had changed.

Everyone indulges in few types of communication – private, public, official and collaborative. As I see, I have better tools for everything that I mentioned. For private communication IM suits perfectly, a one on one real time communication. Public communication can be achieved via Twitter, especially its capabilities have enhanced with excellent clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Twitter also changed the default settings of ‘replies’ going to all your followers, and that has helped in improving twitter experience. Official communication can be achieved via emails and collaboration via Groove, Google docs or Wave. These all makes you wonder the importance of Facebook?

I use Facebook for three purposes – Photo sharing, Social calendar and Social games (yes, I used to play Farmville). Facebook has grown to be the biggest photo sharing site, since it has advantage of tagging people it is attractive but one cannot upload hi-res photos and that’s what bothers me. Secondly, how many photos one wants to share, I think I have hit my limit (not FB’s limit). Social calendar has been a really cool feature and I used it a lot too, but integration of Google Calendar, Gmail and iPhone calendar has worked much better for me. This combination does not tell me who is attending or not attending an event, but if I care about that I can always use email/IM. No comments about social games, they are addictive but scandalous.

My usage of Facebook has reduced drastically, they tried to bring together the experience of IM, but its broken; email, but it has limited capabilities – no forwarding/adding of new recipients, just reply not reply-all, no attachments; calendar, but its not open to exchange (microsoft or other formats); real time updates, but not as efficient as twitter. This does not mean that Google or Twitter has taken market share, it just means that Facebook is losing its capabilities in keeping people at hand. We cannot see it now as it has reached critical mass and growing rapidly, but as I see, people will start (or have started) losing interest in Facebook.  Its main strength was to bring people back to site but that seems to be weakening, combined with the advertising fraud, no proper source of revenue, I see Facebook will have to come up with a plan to keep in this business or they will be the Friendster of 2010. 

Last few weeks have been extremely busy and was completely away from Blogging and Podcasting. Today I had some time and tried WP-FB Connect Plugin to enable commenting on my blog using Facebook login. Seems like it is working now, but I am more excited about the feature where we can have comments in thread format. At this time you can see an addition option “Connect with your Facebook Account” while commenting. So, basically it acts like OpenID with a little bit social feature.

Tried the Sociable plugin which can help build FB community for your site, but I am facing issues with FB login button, will have to work on it.

You can try out different options at Facebook Plugin Directory

For last few months, I have been thinking about the kind of content we are creating over the Facebook. The issue is not regarding the content but its usage, specially with Facebook as the owner of the content.

The problem started arising with the amount of applications mushrooming for the FB platform. Users are promoted for “access” but there are many concerns amongst experts that someone can write an application to bypass that process or disguise an application, whose real purpose is to gather data. A typical example of this is – when we add an application to play some game. They do not need to access our information such as birthday, marital status etc. But we have to grant that access to use that application and we don’t know what they are going to do with our data.

My second concern is regarding the way facebook is handling the data. In November 2008 FB lost all the preferences data and asked user to set there preferences once again. What if they lose some other relevant data or expose this data to some groups.

As far as data loss goes, this isn’t that big a deal. The only data that Facebook lost was preference data, not any messages, photos, videos, or the like. But preference data is also important. What if Facebook had lost everyone’s privacy settings instead of just their e-mail notification settings? It would be (slightly) more serious. – TechCrunch

Third concern is regarding the trust with Facebook. In the episode 181 of Twit, while discussing the topic of Facebook opening its API for status updates (to compete with Twitter) there were few interesting observations made by Wil Wheaton. According to him, How can we trust facebook of not selling our data to some other agencies? How can we trust that they will not misuse our data. Specially when threats like identity theft are becoming more serious, a little mistake on their part can cause serious damages.

Fourth concern is regarding the option of not allowing us to delete our account. Few days back I wanted to delete my account and I realized that there was no such option. The closest thing to that is suspension of account and that can be reactivated by one mail. Why don’t they want to delete my personal data from their servers. If I want to leave your site, I have right to erase all my information from your server.

Fifth concern is regarding the latest Terms of Conditions change by Facebook. According to new TOC, facebook has rights to all the content that we generate or upload on FB. As per Consumerist blog

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

Then, I have some little concerns regarding FB connect where users might be able to write cross-server scripts too and exploit Facebook.

I agree that every person who has a web presence (might)wants to be on FB. But we can reduce the amount of data that we put online. Whatever data we put, we should be comfortable enough if we lose it. I don’t think only facebook is the problem, over time we had discussed same issues with Google and any organization that grows big in size.

Download (15 MB) – subscribe on iTunes

Participants : Thej and Veetrag

Podcast Notes

• Chandrayaan – impact on common man [1], Thej’s interview at BBC.
• Facebook Scribe to go opensource
• Yahoo Application Platform, part of Open Strategy
• Twitter stops IM service and its impact – part of business plan or they are getting out of business?
• Google App Engine to support Java – good or bad?
• Live blog from Eric Schmidt’s talk
• Podcast Recommendations -
  • TWiT – This Week in Tech, one of the best podcasts available.
  • gdgt - Gadget reviews, news updates from the guys who started Engadget.
  • Escapepod – for science fiction lovers, a sci-fi story every week
  • Stack Overflow
  • IT Conversations

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