Thursday, February 18, 2010
Srsly?
(Stolen from Emergent Chaos....a fine blog, btw)
http://emergentchaos.com/archives/2010/02/im-not-comfortable-with-that.html
The language of Facebook's iPhone app is fascinating: If you enable this feature, all contacts from your device will be sent to Facebook...Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information.
So first off, I don’t consent to you using that feature and providing my mobile phone number to Facebook. Not giving my cell phone to random web sites (including but not limited to Facebook) was implicit when that number was provided to you. Your continued compliance is appreciated. What’s really interesting is the way in which this dialog deflects the moral culpability for Facebook’s choices to you. They didn’t have to create a feature that sucked in all the information in your phone book. They could have offered an option to exclude numbers. And why does Facebook even need phone numbers? Their language also implies that such transfers of third party data are not constrained by any law they have to worry about. Perhaps that’s correct in the United States.
But none of that is considered in the brief notice.
I don’t agree.
Me either. I don't have my cell # in FB. I don't have many of my FB contacts in my cell phone. I'm quite happy for those streams of data to exist in "parallel lines that shall never again intersect"* It's probably not worth polling everyone I know to see if A) they have a Jeebus phone and B.) they use the FB Jeebus phone app. Besides, what would they do? If I'm in your cell address book, there's probably a reason. I can't ask folks to NOT use the app or manually enter my number every time they want to call/txt me. But FB really should have provided other options. Selecting who you import would be a good start. Not automatically sucking in information *not needed to run the application* (a novel idea, I know).
http://emergentchaos.com/archives/2010/02/im-not-comfortable-with-that.html
The language of Facebook's iPhone app is fascinating: If you enable this feature, all contacts from your device will be sent to Facebook...Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information.
So first off, I don’t consent to you using that feature and providing my mobile phone number to Facebook. Not giving my cell phone to random web sites (including but not limited to Facebook) was implicit when that number was provided to you. Your continued compliance is appreciated. What’s really interesting is the way in which this dialog deflects the moral culpability for Facebook’s choices to you. They didn’t have to create a feature that sucked in all the information in your phone book. They could have offered an option to exclude numbers. And why does Facebook even need phone numbers? Their language also implies that such transfers of third party data are not constrained by any law they have to worry about. Perhaps that’s correct in the United States.
But none of that is considered in the brief notice.
I don’t agree.
Me either. I don't have my cell # in FB. I don't have many of my FB contacts in my cell phone. I'm quite happy for those streams of data to exist in "parallel lines that shall never again intersect"* It's probably not worth polling everyone I know to see if A) they have a Jeebus phone and B.) they use the FB Jeebus phone app. Besides, what would they do? If I'm in your cell address book, there's probably a reason. I can't ask folks to NOT use the app or manually enter my number every time they want to call/txt me. But FB really should have provided other options. Selecting who you import would be a good start. Not automatically sucking in information *not needed to run the application* (a novel idea, I know).
Facebook, this is yet another epic privacy FAIL. I sure wish I--and everyone I know--knew how to quit you.
*that's a quote from something...I don't remember what. If you know me, you know I'm not good at quotes. I can remember the quote or the source, but generally not both. This case, I got the quote.
