Chris Peterson

Based on the code, this is what it seems that Facebook is about to launch: A mobile version of the site using the HTML5 location component to grab your location information from your phone. Once it does that, you’re taken to this new Places area of Facebook that presumably will have a list of venues around you. From here you can click a button to check-in. Yes, there will be check-ins.

But it’s slightly more interesting than that as well. Facebook will record not only your latitude and longitude, but also your altitude, heading, and speed, according to this code (and assuming they can get all of that information). It will also record the accuracy of the location measurement. I’m just speculating here, but perhaps that will help curb cheating that has begun to run rampant on other location services like Foursquare.

When it first arrived on the scene, Facebook’s main appeal was how well it protected your personal information. Those days are long gone.

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In other words, if you joined Facebook in 2005, most of the stuff you thought you were sharing only with your closest college buddies is now being shared amongst the entire InterWebs.

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Yes, Facebook is free. Yes, it offers many unique and useful services, as well as a lot of useless dreck. Yes, it needs to generate revenue for these free services. But what Facebook is offering now isn’t what most of us signed up for. This isn’t the original agreement. It’s mutated, and not in a survival-of-the-fittest way — more like a ‘slime mold that’s threatening to eat the earth’ kind of way. The future does not bode well.

Do you want everyone on Facebook to see your status? Your information may already be getting shared via another area deep in privacy settings called “Application and Websites.” Many users aren’t aware that there are privacy settings called “Application and Websites” or even “What your friends can share about you” which dictates what your friends can share about you whether or not they realize it. Depending on which friends ‘like’ and comment on your status others on Facebook or friends of friends may be able to see your information.

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Imagine your grandma seeing your status about last night’s epic times because your brother or sister ‘liked’ your status. Think hard, then double check what you are comfortable with “What your friends can share about you.”

(emphasis added).

via BoingBoing: Go ahead, quit Facebook, but they’ll retain and data mine your info

Still, even if you do manage to truly delete your account once and for all, John reports: “You’ll never see that data again. But Facebook will. They still have that information and will continue to use it for data mining.” Will the data at least be anonymized, the reporter asked? The Facebook rep wouldn’t say. Caveat Facebooker.

via NYT: Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook:

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

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They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. “Maybe 2 or 3 percent of the money is from people we know,” said Max Salzberg, 22.

Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 — “four talented young nerds,” Mr. Salzberg says — all of whom met at New York University’s Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said.

On this last point, I’ve also been meaning to check out Hibe, a new social network that claims to be explicitly based on the principles and suggestions of my article“Losing Face”. Nice to know someone liked it!