Facebook storing your information
While this may not be breaking news, it turns out that Facebook has taken just one more step in not respecting their user’s privacy.
According to a semi-recent article in the New York Times, Facebook retains user profile information even after the user has requested deletion so that “a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it”.
The article goes on to discuss the difficulties of deleting an account in full and implies that even after contacting Facebook’s customer service department and being “informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook” that “removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time.”
With the growing number of online companies requesting and storing information, privacy concerns are becoming a bigger issue than ever. It is important for users to realize and understand how their online information is being stored and protected. It is also important for companies to understand that the protection of user information is more important than a usability issue in their application.
Comment by sky
March 2, 2008 @ 11:00 pm
Companies are all making money. Maybe there is in some cases, but in the facebook case, i really don’t see a monetary reason for them to make sure that private data is throughly deleted. It seems to me that until a few precedents are set where users sue and win against the makers of online applications, we will continue to see this disrespect of our privacy.
Comment by Alex Odle
March 2, 2008 @ 11:14 pm
I’ve left facebook and come back at least a few different times and I find the feature really nice. It would have been a huge pain for me to start from scratch with friends, pics, wall, info, etc. Although facebook should definitely work on a way you could permanently delete information you didn’t want on their servers. For example, if someone posts and tags me in a picture I don’t find appropriate, it seems like I should have the opportunity to have myself removed from it permanently.
Comment by chrt00
March 3, 2008 @ 10:25 pm
Not only FB is storing your info, the applications API makes it easy to store information about users. Before (when I was dev’ing an app) there were no privacy options for the applications and the information the app could view, allowing the application to scrape profile info.
Comment by davidjsh
March 3, 2008 @ 10:45 pm
I definitely agree that the ease by which Facebook applications can gather user information is disturbing especially since Facebook gives users the impression that their data will only be available to those they allow, yet this data is being harvested by sources that were never considered to be part of your network.
However I think the common assumption that data posted to sites such as Facebook can ever be considered “private” is dangerous. While I expect Facebook to make its best effort to abide by the claims of privacy that they state, I always assume that information posted to the internet will eventually become accessible to entities that I never intended nor desired especially since people other than myself can affect the distribution of the information. For example photos that I normally cannot view become visible once a friend of mine is tagged in them or comments on them.
Comment by App Crap Editor
November 23, 2008 @ 10:35 pm
Makes you wonder about the security of the apps in Facebook also. Many of them require credit card info for purchases made through the app. I believe the apps use their own hosting so there is no telling how safe your information is.
The internet wasn’t created to do finacial transactions, it was meant as a information exchange.