Have We Lost The Privacy War? 5
March 27th, 2010 by ComputerBob
It seems to me that online service providers are not only violating their users’ privacy rights every day, they’re also contantly thinking of of more and more ways to violate those rights by default — forcing users to take action if they don’t want their rights to be violated.
We’ve all read of how MySpace, Facebook, Google and other online service providers have repeatedly changed their user-privacy policies to reduce the security and privacy of their users’ data by default — automatically “opting-in” users to new, more lax policies without their permission. It’s already gotten so bad that MySpace has already started selling its users’ private data to anyone who’s willing to pay for it.
Here’s the latest example of that type of behavior, which I believe should be illegal: “… Facebook is going to be automatically opting users into a reduced form of Facebook Connect on certain third party sites… So what does that mean? We’ve heard that select Facebook partners will now be able to look for your existing Facebook cookie to identify you, even if you never opted into Facebook Connect on the site you’re visiting. Using that, the third party site will be able to display your friends and other key information. It’s possible that these sites will also be able to display any data you’ve shared with ‘everyone‘, which is of course now the default option on Facebook.”
Like many, many computer users, you may not have even noticed, and you may not even care that your privacy rights are in constant danger of being violated by corporations that use your private data to make billions of dollars each year.
But I care about my privacy rights, so I don’t trust any of my private data to Google, Facebook, MySpace, or any other online service provider that profits from violating its users’ privacy rights.
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Consumer Info, Cybercrime, Ethics, Google, Internet, Law, Rights, Security