Privacy complaint filed in Canada

In keeping with the anti-Facebook series (see Facebook Privacy Concerns, 10 reasons Facebook is hated, Short stats about Facebook, and Facebook policy contradictions?), here’s a news update.

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (of the University of Ottawa) listed 22 violations of Canadian privacy laws. They have officially filed a complaint against Facebook for these violations.

Essentially, the claims revolve around users’ private information being shared beyond what they have given consent to share. Instances include third-party applications, in which too much information (most of which is unneeded) is being provided to the third parties.

If you’re not leaving Facebook already, take this as a sign that you might not want to keep using it: Leo Laporte expressed frustrations with Facebook on one of the TWiT podcasts, net@night, when he talked about Facebook’s undelivered promises that users will be able to add more than 5000 friends.

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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10 reasons Facebook is hated

I’m not posting this, someone else has. Go and read “10 Reasons I Hate Facebook“. Almost sums it up perfectly.

The one I probably agree more intensely than the privacy point is the amount of e-mail. Well, yeah. That’s why I completely removed myself from all current and future mailings from Facebook. This was a link in one of the annoying messages titled “—– has added you as a Friend on Facebook”. (And I never even had an account… never gave Facebook permission to flood my inbox with dozens of similar messages.) I simply chose the legally-valid action: opt-out.

I’m never going to sign up for Facebook, even if I desperately need to find someone. And if you can resist your urges, refuse using Facebook, you can be a noble person too.

(5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Facebook Privacy Concerns

This is my first post in a series about Facebook and why you shouldn’t be using it.

In their own words

From the Facebook Privacy Policy:

You post User Content (as defined in the Facebook Terms of Use) on the Site at your own risk. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your pages, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your pages and information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.

When you use Facebook, certain information you post or share with third parties (e.g., a friend or someone in your network), such as personal information, comments, messages, photos, videos, Marketplace listings or other information, may be shared with other users in accordance with the privacy settings you select. All such sharing of information is done at your own risk. Please keep in mind that if you disclose personal information in your profile or when posting comments, messages, photos, videos, Marketplace listings or other items , this information may become publicly available.

In simple English: Facebook collects a huge amount of information about you and makes that huge amount of information available to others.

Do the users ever read this?

I truly wonder whether the children between the ages of 13 and 18 ever read the Privacy Policy, and if so, whether or not they understand it.

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(5 votes, average: 4.2 out of 5)

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Some statistics

Many sites on the Internet like to show off their visitor stats (in the form of a hit counter) as well as the site uptime. I’d like to give a sense of our stats as well, so here’s some data from Google Analytics. Care has been taken to ensure that no personally-identifiable information is published, so the statistics that are seen below are aggregated data that cannot be linked to any specific user.

Hopefully, this gives a good idea of the sort of data I work with when dealing with visitor information on Google Analytics. Please note that these are not the total stats for this site over its lifetime, but rather in the past 30 (or was it 31?) days.

I also have access to a few other pieces of information about visitors that can directly aid in the development of the site, and that is: browser information. Take a look at the PDF file.

Basically, I am told that 85.81% of Geekie.org visitors run on Firefox. That’s very good, since our site is optimally designed for standards-compliant browsers like Firefox. Following that is Internet Explorer (any version) at 9.94%. Following these are (in order), Safari, Mozilla (Seamonkey), and Opera. The remaining are omitted here in the post as they could be linked to individual users.

Another piece of data that aids significantly in the development of this site is information on users’ screen resolutions. Given that anyone with a screen below 1024 * 768 cannot view the site properly, I am glad that only 1.57% of our users had resolutions below this. Everyone else had large screens, the least of which was 1024 * 768 and the largest, 3360 * 1650! That’s a mighty screen!

I cannot release a PDF report on screen resolutions since that could lead to violations of our privacy policy. (This is a good opportunity to remind users that our privacy policy has been updated and the new version took effect on January 1, 2008.)

Our site uptime hovers above 99.6%.

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