Douglas Rushkoff - Users for Sale: Has Digital Illiteracy Turned Us Into Social Commodities?

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Mashable have a great interview with the always-thought-provoking Douglas Rushkoff in which he dismantles the idea that the "users" of social media are its customers, pointing out that we are, in fact the product being sold:

"The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it means we are the product being delivered to those customers."

Facebook have (very quietly) enabled their facial recognition technology for all accounts

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Facebook have turned on their new facial recognition feature for all accounts (it's been active in the United States since last year). This means that when you upload a new picture to Facebook, it is automatically scanned by Facebook's facial recognition software to try and match and faces in the picture with people already tagged in existing pictures on Facebook. If it thinks it finds a match, it will prompt the user uploading the picture to tag it accordingly. The feature is 'on' by default. To find out more, including how to turn off the feature, check out this article at The Register.

How Facebook is sharing our secrets with the world | The Observer

If you want to surf the zeitgeist, then look at the most common queries on Google. When I looked the other day, "How do I delete my Facebook account?" was fourth on the "How do I...?" list. Just to put this in context, number two was "How do I know if I'm pregnant?" You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to twig that something's up."

Read the full article at guardian.co.uk

 

Facebook is not your friend | guardian.co.uk

There is a wonderful graphic on the New York Times site showing how Facebook's privacy statement has got larger and larger to cover the growing holes in its privacy policy. The mapping isn't perfect: if it were, the declaration of Facebook's dedication to privacy would have to be of almost infinite size, since the default amount of privacy Facebook now offers is practically zero. When the site first started, very few people could join, and nothing became public, even to them, without the users' express permission. Now everyone can join and everything is public to almost all of them unless you make a determined effort to hide it. This effort has to be renewed every six months or so when Facebook revises its privacy policy to make it more opaque and less effective. There is a wonderfully graphic animation of the process at this site.

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