[Update: according to Neil Rubenking, FB chat is now working again and it’s no longer possible to view friend requests or chat activity for other users.] I’ve just blogged yet again about Facebook and privacy: I don’t usually publish the same content on different blog sites, but this is a recurrent hot topic in the ThreatBlog,
[Update: according to Neil Rubenking, FB chat is now working again and it’s no longer possible to view friend requests or chat activity for other users.]
I’ve just blogged yet again about Facebook and privacy: I don’t usually publish the same content on different blog sites, but this is a recurrent hot topic in the ThreatBlog, as you can see from following threads like this, while a post by Kevin Townsend that’s crossed my radar since I posted summarizes neatly why so many people feel that Facebook and privacy don’t belong in the same sentence. In fact, FB is currently possibly even less popular than the UK’s (currently) governing Labour Party, which seems to have reached a point where it can’t do right for doing wrong in the eyes of the electorate.
TechCrunch describes (complete with video) how a Facebook security issue allows us to eavesdrop on our friends’ live chats. Since FB chat is “down for maintenance” at the moment, perhaps they’re in the process of fixing it. We can but hope.
Meanwhile, over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kurt Opsahl illustrates how Facebook has moved away from privacy protection since its inception, using snapshot views of its privacy policy over the past five years. See: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/
Hat tips to @jleyden and @SocialMediaSec for the pointers.
David Harley CISSP FBCS CITP
Research Fellow & Director of Malware Intelligence
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