I see the notification thingy right up there!
I’ll wait for the first update.
That should come in a week or so.
With at least ten WP installations around the Web under my management, Read it all
social media
Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition
Maybe it’s time to quit posting personal photos online.
Anywhere.
Actually, it’s too late for me.
But I could continue to abstain from posting photos of new family members.
See what you make of these excerpts from an article I quickly scanned tonight:
With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.
The repercussions of these studies go far beyond putting a name with a face; researchers Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman anticipate that such technology represents a leap forward in the convergence of offline and online data and an advancement of the “augmented reality” of complementary lives. With the use of publicly available Web 2.0 data, the researchers can potentially go from a snapshot to a Social Security number in a matter of minutes:
[…]
The relevant point here is not Schmidt’s thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you’ve inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can’t change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face.
How naive we’ve been.
Well, for me, “had been.” The moment of awakening to this came several weeks ago. But still, prior to that was much too long a time to have been naive.
For a generally-suspicious, naturally-cynical, privacy-and-security-conscious person, that’s pretty bad.
But now it’s now…so…now what?
Do we just accept our fate and continue carelessly?
I say, “No!”
(So…?)
Facebook: Its Face in Your Book
If your life is an open book, Facebook has had its face deep into it.
And if you thought your life was a closed book, Facebook has had its face deep into it, you poor deluded soul.
Facebook privacy issues: Social network is watching you even when you’re logged out
Facebook has admitted that it has been watching the web pages its members visit – even when they have logged out.
In its latest privacy blunder, the social networking site was forced to confirm that it has been constantly tracking its 750million users, even when they are using other sites.
The social networking giant says the huge privacy breach was simply a mistake – that software automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they logged in to Facebook ‘inadvertently’ sent information to the company, whether or not they were logged in at the time.
Before this, it was OnStar.
What next?
My cellphone listening in, even when it’s not on a call? Or when it’s allegedly turned off?
And what about Google?
Or my answering machine?
Or my toaster? 😯
OK. I lost interest in fleshing out this post. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. I have a real life to live…and that means I have to earn a living. Or rather, try. 🙁
PS to Facebook: The “blunder” and “mistake” and “inadvertently” and “bug” concepts all require the willing suspension of disbelief.
Huge Regret: I Trusted Firefox
I have been a loyal Firefox user for years. Hugely so.
Well, we reap what we so(w). Hugely. Actually, harvests are always more huge than what we sow, but that’s another (hugely important) subject.
About 23 hours ago I tried something new in my Firefox browser: creating an additional profile in a custom location. (That’s actually two new things.) Then I deleted the profile, having done absolutely nothing with it.
My payback from the world’s best browser? 🙄
Firefox deleted hundreds of non-Firefox files in the custom location, including tax and banking records. And the action can’t be undone.
I. Was. Just. Sick.
Two questions for Firefox:
- Why does your Profile Manager do such a stupid thing?
- Why doesn’t the dialog box tell us that’s what you’re going to do?
Just to be “fair,” I’ll acknowledge that if I had done even a little research online, I would have learned that Firefox does such a stupid thing.
Deleting a Firefox Thunderbird or SeaMonkey 2 profile
Warning: The folder for the profile you are planning to delete may contain non-Mozilla files, if you created the profile in a custom location see above. If you use the “Delete Files” option to delete that profile, the entire folder and all of the contents will be deleted, including any non-Mozilla files it may contain. This cannot be undone! For this reason, you should choose the “Don’t Delete Files” option when deleting a profile. If you want to delete the profile folder, you can do that manually.
(Emphasis not mine.)
But why should I assume I need to research such a thing when the dialog box doesn’t warn of it? (Emphasis all mine.)
Click image to see more of the screen shot
I. Feel. Betrayed. By. My. Trusted. Browser. 😳
Will I now switch to Google Chrome? 🙄
Well, how do I know it won’t pull something just as dastardly?
Besides, it’s Google. 😯
OK. That’s enough moaning for now. I need to see how much I can restore from back-up. And then see how much of that backed up data needs updating.
PS: No, I didn’t have time to put this together. But this is my way of giving back to the Firefox community. Or something. 🙂
Fix Your Facebook News Feed
Facebook is fooling around with your friends.
And with you.
Did you know?
If you don’t, you should. It’s already old news!
When you “friend” somebody on Facebook, you’ll be able to see their posts on your News Feed forever, right?
When you post a Status update on Facebook, all your friends see it on their News Feeds, as long as they haven’t opted to “Hide” your posts, right?
It’s possible to know who’s seeing your status updates, right?
Wrong, wrong and wrong!
[…]
The truth is that Facebook recently started using secret criteria to decide whether or not you’ll maintain this News Feed relationship. Read it all
Down: Google, Facebook, Twitter
I just thought I’d tell you.
Something is amiss.
Google isn’t coming up. Neither is Facebook. Nor Twitter.
I haven’t looked at the news yet, so I don’t know if this is widespread.
Or ominous.
Pity all the addicts of such services.
Facebook Privacy: Oxymoron?
Just askin’, OK? 😀
Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.
The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online—a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It’s unclear how long the breach was in place. On Sunday, a Facebook spokesman said it is taking steps to “dramatically limit” the exposure of users’ personal information.
Better read the whole article, I suppose: Facebook in Online Privacy Breach; Applications Transmitting Identifying Information.