When John Doe sign up for a service using Facebook, the company that provides that service has paid Facebook not only for the right to affiliate with Facebook but also for access to John Doe’s information, including his birthday, political views, URLs John has visited, his recent purchases, favourite things and so on. This data can be used, for example, to raise the prices for items they are sure John Doe will buy, and lower them for things John Doe might not buy.
Not only are they offered all this information about the John Doe who signed with them, but if the company has paid for “enterprise” or “pro” data access, they are also offered all of YOUR information, if you are in John Doe’s contact list.
Read about it in Cory Doctorow’s piece in BoingBoing.
Remember, when you delete things or say you don’t want your facebook friends to see them, Facebook itself does not delete them, nor promise not to sell / share them. Your so-called privacy settings affect what you share with your contacts, not what Facebook can share with its partners and ‘trusted associates.’ There are no huge office buildings with people reading all of John’s data, of course, it’s all harvested and sorted into categories using complex software routines… the same sort of software routines that allow a website like Google to search the entire world wide web and find the things you’re looking for in seconds.
If you use Facebook and an Android phone, you should also read these articles about the new ‘permissions’ Facebook requires you to approve, such as reading (and storing for analysis of you and your contacts) any SMS text messages that come in or out of your phone, the ability to prevent your phone from ‘sleeping’, the ability to turn on wifi even if you’ve turned it off, turn your phone’s sound on if you have it set to silent, turn on the phone’s camera or microphone without telling you, send e-mail from your phone without telling you, open your address book and delete your friends’ personal e-mail addresses replacing them with their Facebook e-mail addresses, and so on.
J. Angelo Racoma, “Is Facebook Messenger Spying on us?” on The Droid Guy,
Daniel Brecht, “Facebook’s Android App Heightens SMS Privacy Concerns” on TextMessagingResource,
Tony Calileo on his blog.
Tip: time to start texting friends you know are Facebook addicts with texts like: “I’ve been looking at digital cameras, but I think unless the prices go down about 20%, what I’ve got will do me for another year or two.”