Legal Research

Another reason to teach social literacy

Social sites are not going away. So we must make sure that folks are aware of the privacy settings that they can have control over and what they need to know.

This is being reported everywhere this week: LINK

"The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put together a campaign to raise awareness of privacy issues surrounding Facebook applications, in particular quizzes. According to this group, the millions of Facebook users taking quizzes are revealing far more personal information to application developers than they are aware of. This is mostly due to the fact that Facebook's default privacy settings allow access to all your profile information whether or not your profile is set to "private." Even worse, the ACLU reports that even if you shun quizzes yourself, your profile info is revealed when one of your friends takes a quiz. Want to see how bad the problem is?"

Is privacy dead? Probably - especially for those folks who don't learn what they need to know to take control.

Can you imagine if libraries managed library cards and registries and student records like this?

Why the double standard? Do the needs of advertisers to know their users trump individual rights?

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on August 30, 2009 (boomark / email).