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

Facial-facebook-1
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.

Privacy and The Census - Wendy Grossman in ORGZine

Census2011_rgb
Have you completed your 2011 Census form yet? Or have you binned it? There has been a lot of grumbling about this year's census, mostly around the security of personal data, so Wendy Grossman's article 'Standing up for the census' in the current ORGZine (Open Rights Group's online magazine) makes an interesting read.

"I have – both here and elsewhere – written a great deal about privacy and the dangers of thoughtlessly surrendering information but I'm inclined to defend the census. And here's why: it's transparent. Of all the data-gathering exercises to which our lives are subject it's the only one that is. When you fill out the form you know exactly what information you are divulging, when, and to whom. Although the form threatens you with legal sanctions for not replying, it's not enforced."

And if you care about your online privacy and digital rights, why not join Open Rights Group and help support their work. 

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.

Read the rest of this post »