CNN asks "When did Facebook become so uncool?" - Duh....The day it was created

I've said it here numerous times....FACEBOOK is not cool, never has been. It was created by a guy who wanted to extract revenge on other Harvard types that wouldn't allow him to be one of the "cool kids". This is NOT the kind of thing you want to be involved with.

Now, Facebook is becoming " Big Brother " and people are finally waking up to the real insidious nature of what Zuckerberg created and profited from...People admire him - I see nothing but a geeky kid who created his own world and got many "sheep-ple" to follow him.

Not me. Not now, not ever. Do yourself a favor and kill your Facebook account.
Really, you'll thank me later.

CNN ? - They are as clueless as the other sheep-ple who gave Zuckerberg $$$ for getting people to follow his unethical website which is now being seen for what it really is....worthless. To think that people feel this sham is worth $$$ is unbelievable to me and proves what P.T. Barnum knew 100 years ago:

" There's a sucker born every minute"


When did Facebook become so uncool? By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) -- Something strange happened Monday on the Internet.

Facebook -- the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room -- may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged.

What changed? Facebook -- no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation -- spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-sharing app Instagram.

When it did so, it stirred up a caldron of ill will that the "People of the Internet" have been harboring toward Mark Zuckerberg's once-hip company. Some Instagram users said they were downloading all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn't get its hands on them.

Pundits weren't kind to Facebook, either. David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the Instagram purchase, noted that the company is looking more and more like "Big Friend," a gentler variation on George Orwell's all-seeing Big Brother. Data indicate others share that view, too. A new poll, conducted before the Instagram news, found that 28% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Facebook -- twice as many as disapprove of Apple and nearly three times as many as Google.

This backlash highlights a new reality: As a technological juggernaut, Facebook is more Microsoft than Tumblr. To use a musical analogy employed on Twitter, it's the Nickelback to Instagram's Bon Iver.

Facebook and Instagram's images couldn't be more different, so it's tempting to say that this Goliath-buys-David event is a turning point for Facebook. But people have been writing about Facebook losing its mojo for years now. In 2009, AdWeek ran this headline: "Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24s?" A year later, mainstream news websites noted the phenomenon of parents and grandparents joining Facebook, scaring off younger people.

"It's official, Facebook is becoming uncool," CBS declared.

It's hard to pinpoint the moment when Facebook's image problem started. Maybe it was when users realized how much data Facebook was collecting about them. Maybe it was when CEO Zuckerberg started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.

But it is possible to take a look at the conversation and tease out a few factors that seem to have led to Facebook's current status as an inescapable, perhaps Orwellian, Internet giant.

First: Money. Nothing leads to public skepticism quite like a few billion dollars in pocket change. Compare that kind of situation at Facebook to Instagram, which as CNNMoney notes, hadn't monetized its product. It didn't support advertisements and apparently didn't sell its users' data.

Facebook, on the other hand, is accused of profiting wildly on the backs of the 850 million people who share personal details about their lives on the social network. For more on that, see The Wall Street Journal's recent feature "Selling You on Facebook," which analyzes the info that Facebook apps collect.

Second: Size. As companies get bigger, people tend to question their motives. Google is a good example of this view. The Silicon Valley company once was the darling of the Internet -- the search engine that didn't have ads on its homepage and declared its company ethos was "Don't Be Evil." As the tech blog Gizmodo writes, Google "built a very lucrative company on the reputation of user respect."

That was easy enough when Google was small. As it grew, however, some people started to lose faith in the company -- and to question its motives.

Gizmodo: "In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services -- Gmail, Search, YouTube and more -- and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for."

People never talked that way about Instagram, which only had 13 employees and 33 million users. It's the kind of company journalists love to use the word "scrappy" to describe.

Third: Trust. As the company has grown, some people have come to trust Facebook so little that they're pulling photos from Instagram in advance of the takeover.

According to Megan Garber at The Atlantic, 25,000 people visited Instaport's site in six hours on Monday after the news broke, compared with 400 people on a normal day. Instaport is a service that helps people pull photos off Instagram for home storage.

"You could read that spike, on the one hand, as a mass freak-out on the part of users who don't trust Facebook -- despite Mark Zuckerberg's promises -- with their networks and memories," Garber writes. "You could also read it as an insurance play, a just-to-be-safe move on the part of people who want to feel sure that their photos are secure."

Mistrust of Facebook stems in part from concern about its privacy policies, which have been described as overly confusing. Facebook itself acknowledges that privacy concerns could trip up the company in the future.

In its initial public offering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company wrote: "We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand."

Finally: The cool factor. Maybe it's less that people see Facebook as evil and more that the site just isn't as cool as it used to be -- partly because it's so popular and also because it's not the new kid on the block anymore. Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, which is eons ago in Internet time. MySpace and Friendster -- all of Facebook's predecessors -- didn't survive (or didn't continue to grow) for this long.

Instagram, meanwhile, was founded in late 2010 and was only in recent months becoming part of the zeitgist. iPhone-toting hipster types liked the app for its mobility -- you cold post photos easily from your phone -- and filters that gave their pics a retro, vintage vibe.

"Instagram is, in a word, cool. Facebook is losing its 'cool', rapidly," wrote Allan Swann at the Computer Business Review.

Instagram managed to create a cache in part from its status as an underground hit. Even with tens of millions of users, the app was praised by reviewers as intimate -- a place, true or not, where it was safe to post personal photos and share stories with a relatively small network of friends. (Just to throw in some data: I have 815 Facebook friends but only 67 people whom I follow on Instagram, and I actually know almost all of them.)

It's not clear that any of that will change for Instagram. Zuckerberg says the app will continue to operate as a product that's independent from Facebook and that people won't have to post Instagram photos to Facebook just because the company owns the app. But the backlash helped crystallize the idea that Facebook no longer is seen as the always-cool company that everybody implicitly trusts.

"Some Instagram fans are acting as if this is a tragedy," Horsey of the Los Angeles Times writes of the acquisition. "They liked the idea that there was a little corner of the online world where they could gather and be outside the reach of the Zuckerberg empire. ..."

There was a time when people clamored to be part of Zuckerberg's network, which launched at first only for Harvard students. But now, as the Instagram backlash shows, Facebook has long stopped being an exclusive club. It's seen as the big, bland company that the app's users worry will ruin the cool thing they had going.

Photo of the day

Good advice for those who are too involved in Facebook - Posting and walking are not compatible.

The " F" in Facebook stands for " FAIL"

Articles like this one give me satisfaction as the idiots who fawn over Facebook are as clueless as those who use it. I wrote about the utter stupidity that Facebook represents and how I was NEVER going to join it as it was a vapid, self centered brainchild of a feckless kid who went to Harvard and was pissed off at the rich kids who shunned him. He created Facebook as his pentulant revenge to show how he could become better than the rich bullies who shunned him.

So now, All the "Cool Kids" are quitting Facebook ? How about the COOLER people knew better than to ever use it in the first place....To those who have invested in this empty place on the web, you've been had....It amounts to the newest version of AOL. Both are over and both were given too much credit for very little other than fleecing people of personal info and enabling people to place way too much info on the web that didn't need to be there.

When people act like sheep, they are usually lead to slaughter....don't be a sheep. Be a Sheepdog.

All the Cool Kids Are Quitting Facebook
Atlantic Monthly

Adam Clark Estes

The best reason to quit Facebook can be summed up in one quote from a 29-year-old in Jenna Wortham's latest item in The New York Times: "People always raise an eyebrow. But my life has gone on just fine without it." Like a lot of Times trend pieces, people have been talking about this phenomenon for ages. But Wortham's news peg is startling. Citing comScore Wortham reports that Facebook is continuing to grow in the United States, but after a 56 percent boost from October 2009 to October 2010, Facebook grew only ten percent from October 2010 to October of this year. Why? Well, Wortham gives a lot of reasons, quoting experts and so forth. But it's all very clear to us. To wear out that worn out Social Network quote a bit more: Joining Facebook isn't cool. You know what's cool? Quitting Facebook

Facebook will offer " Cloud Girlfriend " - They oughta rename it to "FAKEBOOK"

People are acting more delusional and Facebook is leading the way in assisting them.



It used to be that if you made something up to deceive others, it was seen as dishonest and wrong...now, we have a start-up company that will provide you with an online " Cloud Girlfriend " who will provide you with "the illusion" of a real person who is your girlfriend....and chats with you online so other Facebook users can see this....

WTF?? I think by the nature of what it represents, and how people use the product (by design), we should rename Facebook to FAKEBOOK as the stuff it shows people is more fake than real....

One more sign that people should ditch Facebook and focus on having real realtionships with friends & family....Facebook and the "Cloud Girlfriend" start-up offer a "fake" sense of connection to real relationships...and the narcissistic nature of this type of behavior is just repugnant.

Fake Facebook Girlfriends From "Cloud Girlfriend" Will Be Run By Real People Dylan Love Mar. 28, 2011, businessinsider.com

Get A Fake Facebook Girlfriend With New Startup "Cloud Girlfriend"
"Cloud Girlfriend," is a startup that creates the "perfect girlfriend" out of thin air for users. The "perfect girlfriend" then sends you public messages on your Facebook wall, so you can deceive your friends into thinking you have a girlfriend as well as make you feel like you have a companion.

After we covered the company, co-founder David Fuhriman reached out to fill us in on some more details about Cloud Girlfriend: Cloud Girlfriend will consist of a network of real human beings, not automated bots, that users will interact with over Facebook. Fuhriman thinks it can help guys get a girlfriend.

If visitors to your Facebook profile to see wall posts from your imaginary sweetheart, they might think, "Someone else thinks highly enough of this person to date him, so maybe I should too." Cloud Girlfriend is not a porn site or adult chat service. (Although it does remind us of a hotline where you can talk to someone of the opposite sex if you're lonely.)

Fuhriman said the site has a therapeutic value and can fulfill psychological needs like intimacy and friendship even though the interaction is virtual. He also maintains that these interactions can even build self confidence and help users navigate real-life situations. We asked Fuhriman for some details about how he plans to follow Facebook's terms of service and make money, but he said those were details he couldn't go into.

If he's going to be toying with Facebook profiles to create fake girlfriends, we assume Facebook will hammer him. Facebook doesn't want spammy accounts filling up the social network. Fuhriman thinks his company will enhance someone's experience on a social network, not dilute it. He also notes it's already filled with fake accounts: "There will always be more profiles of dogs and cats on social networks than there will ever be of Cloud Girlfriends."

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies(and online programs) do....

Let me start by saying I am not afraid of technology....I embraced the use of computers as far back as the late 1970s when a computer was a huge teletype at the High School and the computer it communicated with was a bigger mainframe miles away...I bought an Apple Mac (Mac Plus) back in the mid 80s.. I find them to be useful tools and like any other tool, if misused, it can injure you.

I am no fan of Facebook and it's pervasive intrusion into all aspects of online life...updates available through your car's computerized systems are obnoxious...The ability for others to gain info is bad enough but people willingly sign up for this crappola...and pay for it too! My vehicle needs to start, run and get me from point " A" to " B " and back again....If I need to let people know where I am, I can call them or text them.....Having the car update them or getting updates from my car is plain stupid. Do yourself a favor and KILL your Facebook account while you can....really...you'll thank me later on.

So now we get to the cell phone....a necessity these days....I have a non-GPS phone that texts and calls but not much else....It works fine and I really don't need mobile games or e-mail....I have the IPAD for that stuff...as needed.

Well owners of the so called " Smartphones" might want to read this....they are tracking your every move and you are enabling them to do so....Like anything else, that info is fine as long as it isn't misused....just like the rest of the technology helpers we have....makes you think about it, eh?

One Politician in Germany decided to find out what they were tracking about himself...the picture he paints ain't pretty.....

It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know
By NOAM COHEN - NT TIMES
Published: March 26, 2011

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

Malte Spitz was surprised by how much detail Deutsche Telekom had about his whereabouts.

But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.

Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.

Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”

“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.

Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”

AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)

Because of Germany’s history, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr. Spitz first went to court to get his entire file in 2009 but Deutsche Telekom objected.

For six months, he said, there was a “Ping Pong game” of lawyers’ letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. Soon thereafter, the two sides reached a settlement: “I only get the information that is related to me, and I don’t get all the information like who am I calling, who sent me a SMS and so on,” Mr. Spitz said, referring to text messages.

Even so, 35,831 pieces of information were sent to him by Deutsche Telekom as an encrypted file, to protect his privacy during its transmission.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile, Mr. Spitz’s carrier, wrote in an e-mail that it stored six months’ of data, as required by the law, and that after the court ruling it “immediately ceased” storing data.

And a year after the court ruling outlawing this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed. Mr. Spitz, at 26 a member of the Green Party’s executive board, says he released that material to influence that debate.

“I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are.”

While the potential for abuse is easy to imagine, in Mr. Spitz’s case, there was not much revealed.

“I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he said. “I am not really walking that much around.”

Any embarrassing details? “The data shows that I am flying sometimes,” he said, rather than taking a more fuel-efficient train. “Something not that popular for a Green politician.”

Data Mining your personal info from the Internet - "There's no code of conduct. There's no standard. There's nothing that safeguards privacy...."

The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said (in 1999) that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring."

"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology.

"Get over it."

Well that may be but there is a growing concern about how interconnected we all are and do we really need your car to be connected to Facebook (as GM is now offering in one of it's advertisements)???

I like being able to go online, find needed info and do not fear the ability for the Internet to mine info but I feel there needs to be a balance....sometime, too much of a good thing is TOO MUCH of a good thing. No one needs the info they "mine" from your online searches and the key issue will ultimately be what is done with that info......The potential for abuse is sometime great and that should concern everyone.


Thursday, Mar. 10, 2011
Data Mining: How Companies Now Know Everything About You
By Joel Stein - TIME magazine

Three hours after I gave my name and e-mail address to Michael Fertik, the CEO of Reputation.com, he called me back and read my Social Security number to me. "We had it a couple of hours ago," he said. "I was just too busy to call."

In the past few months, I have been told many more-interesting facts about myself than my Social Security number. I've gathered a bit of the vast amount of data that's being collected both online and off by companies in stealth — taken from the websites I look at, the stuff I buy, my Facebook photos, my warranty cards, my customer-reward cards, the songs I listen to online, surveys I was guilted into filling out and magazines I subscribe to.

Google's Ads Preferences believes I'm a guy interested in politics, Asian food, perfume, celebrity gossip, animated movies and crime but who doesn't care about "books & literature" or "people & society." (So not true.) Yahoo! has me down as a 36-to-45-year-old male who uses a Mac computer and likes hockey, rap, rock, parenting, recipes, clothes and beauty products; it also thinks I live in New York, even though I moved to Los Angeles more than six years ago. Alliance Data, an enormous data-marketing firm in Texas, knows that I'm a 39-year-old college-educated Jewish male who takes in at least $125,000 a year, makes most of his purchases online and spends an average of only $25 per item. Specifically, it knows that on Jan. 24, 2004, I spent $46 on "low-ticket gifts and merchandise" and that on Oct. 10, 2010, I spent $180 on intimate apparel. It knows about more than 100 purchases in between. Alliance also knows I owe $854,000 on a house built in 1939 that — get this — it thinks has stucco walls. They're mostly wood siding with a little stucco on the bottom! Idiots.

EXelate, a Manhattan company that acts as an exchange for the buying and selling of people's data, thinks I have a high net worth and dig green living and travel within the U.S. BlueKai, one of eXelate's competitors in Bellevue, Wash., believes I'm a "collegiate-minded" senior executive with a high net worth who rents sports cars (note to Time Inc. accounting: it's wrong unless the Toyota Yaris is a sports car). At one point BlueKai also believed, probably based on my $180 splurge for my wife Cassandra on HerRoom.com, that I was an 18-to-19-year-old woman.

RapLeaf, a data-mining company that was recently banned by Facebook because it mined people's user IDs, has me down as a 35-to-44-year-old married male with a graduate degree living in L.A. But RapLeaf thinks I have no kids, work as a medical professional and drive a truck. RapLeaf clearly does not read my column in TIME. (See 25 websites you can't live without.)

Intellidyn, a company that buys and sells data, searched its file on me, which says I'm a writer at Time Inc. and a "highly assimilated" Jew. It knows that Cassandra and I like gardening, fashion, home decorating and exercise, though in my case the word like means "am forced to be involved in." We are pretty unlikely to buy car insurance by mail but extremely likely to go on a European river cruise, despite the fact that we are totally not going to go on a European river cruise. There are tons of other companies I could have called to learn more about myself, but in a result no one could have predicted, I got bored. (Comment on this story.)

Each of these pieces of information (and misinformation) about me is sold for about two-fifths of a cent to advertisers, which then deliver me an Internet ad, send me a catalog or mail me a credit-card offer. This data is collected in lots of ways, such as tracking devices (like cookies) on websites that allow a company to identify you as you travel around the Web and apps you download on your cell that look at your contact list and location. You know how everything has seemed free for the past few years? It wasn't. It's just that no one told you that instead of using money, you were paying with your personal information.

The Creep Factor

There is now an enormous multibillion-dollar industry based on the collection and sale of this personal and behavioral data, an industry that Senator John Kerry, chair of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, is hoping to rein in. Kerry is about to introduce a bill that would require companies to make sure all the stuff they know about you is secured from hackers and to let you inspect everything they have on you, correct any mistakes and opt out of being tracked. He is doing this because, he argues, "There's no code of conduct. There's no standard. There's nothing that safeguards privacy and establishes rules of the road."

At Senate hearings on privacy beginning March 16, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be weighing in on how to protect consumers. It has already issued a report that calls upon the major browsers to come up with a do-not-track mechanism that allows people to choose not to have their information collected by companies they aren't directly doing business with. Under any such plan, it would likely still be O.K. for Amazon to remember your past orders and make purchase suggestions or for American Express to figure your card was stolen because a recent purchase doesn't fit your precise buying patterns. But it wouldn't be cool if they gave another company that information without your permission. (See "Will FTC's 'Do Not Track' Go Even Further than Expected?")

Taking your information without asking and then profiting from it isn't new: it's the idea behind the phone book, junk mail and telemarketing. Worrying about it is just as old: in 1890, Louis Brandeis argued that printing a photograph without the subject's permission inflicts "mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily harm." Once again, new technology is making us weigh what we're sacrificing in privacy against what we're gaining in instant access to information. Some facts about you were always public — the price of your home, some divorce papers, your criminal records, your political donations — but they were held in different buildings, accessible only by those who filled out annoying forms; now they can be clicked on. Other information was not possible to compile pre-Internet because it would have required sending a person to follow each of us around the mall, listen to our conversations and watch what we read in the newspaper. Now all of those activities happen online — and can be tracked instantaneously.

Part of the problem people have with data mining is that it seems so creepy. Right after I e-mailed a friend in Texas that I might be coming to town, a suggestion for a restaurant in Houston popped up as a one-line all-text ad above my Gmail inbox. But it's not a barbecue-pit master stalking me, which would indeed be creepy; it's an algorithm designed to give me more useful, specific ads. And while that doesn't sound like all that good a deal in exchange for my private data, if it means that I get to learn when the next Paul Thomas Anderson movie is coming out, when Wilco is playing near my house and when Tom Colicchio is opening a restaurant close by, maybe that's not such a bad return.

Since targeted ads are so much more effective than nontargeted ones, websites can charge much more for them. This is why — compared with the old banners and pop-ups — online ads have become smaller and less invasive, and why websites have been able to provide better content and still be free. Besides, the fact that I'm going to Houston is bundled with the information that 999 other people are Houston-bound and is auctioned by a computer; no actual person looks at my name or my Houston-boundness. Advertisers are interested only in tiny chunks of information about my behavior, not my whole profile, which is one of the reasons M. Ryan Calo, a Stanford Law School professor who is director of the school's Consumer Privacy Project, argues that data mining does no actual damage. (See "How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy.")

"We have this feeling of being dogged that's uncomfortable," Calo says, "but the risk of privacy harm isn't necessarily harmful. Let's get serious and talk about what harm really is." The real problem with data mining, Calo and others believe, arises when the data is wrong. "It's one thing to see bad ads because of bad information about you. It's another thing if you're not getting a credit card or a job because of bad information," says Justin Brookman, the former chief of the Internet bureau of the New York attorney general's office, who is now the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group in Washington. (Comment on this story.)

Russell Glass, the CEO of Bizo — which mines the fact that people are business executives and sells that info to hundreds of advertisers such as American Express, Monster.com, Citibank, Sprint and Google — says the newness of his industry is what scares people. "It's the monster-under-the-bed syndrome," Glass says. "People are afraid of what they really don't understand. They don't understand that companies like us have no idea who they are. And we really don't give a s — -. I just want a little information that will help me sell you an ad." Not many people, he notes, seem to be creeped out by all the junk mail they still get from direct-marketing campaigns, which buy the same information from data-mining companies. "I have a 2-year-old daughter who is getting mail at my home address," he says. "That freaks me out."

See pictures of Facebook's headquarters.

See "Google's War Against Rotten Search Results."

Why That Ad Is Following You
Junk mail is a familiar evil that's barely changed over the decades. Data mining and the advertising it supports get more refined every month. The latest trick to freak people out is retargeting — when you look at an item in an online store and then an ad for that item follows you around to other sites.

Last year, Zappos was the most prominent company in the U.S. to go all out in behavioral retargeting. And people got pissed off. One of the company's mistakes was running ads too frequently and coming off as an annoying, persistent salesman. "We took that brick-and-mortar pet peeve and implied it online," says Darrin Shamo, Zappos' director of direct marketing. Shamo learned, the hard way, that people get upset when their computer shows lingerie ads, even if they had been recently shopping for G-strings, since people share computers and use them in front of their kids. He also learned that ads that reveal potential Christmas gifts are bad for business. (See a brief history of online shopping.)

Since then, Zappos has been experimenting with new ads that people will see no more than five times and for no longer than eight days. Zappos has also dumbed the ads down, showing items that aren't the ones you considered buying but are sort of close, which people greatly prefer. And much like Amazon's "Customers who bought 1984 also bought Brave New World"–style recommendation engine, the new ads tell people what Zappos knows about them and how they got that information ("a company called Criteo helps Zappos to create these kinds of personalized ads"). It also tells them how they can opt out of seeing them ("Some people prefer rainbows. And others prefer unicorns. If you prefer not to see personalized ads, we totally get it").

If that calms the angry 15% of the people who saw these ads, Zappos will stick with them. Otherwise, it plans on quitting the retargeting business. Shamo thinks he'll just need to wait until the newness wears off and people are used to ads tailored for them. "Sometimes things don't move as fast as you think," he says. (Read about Shoefitr, a service that helps shoppers buy shoes online.)

They're not even moving that much faster with the generation that grew up with the Internet. While young people expect more of their data to be mined and used, that doesn't mean they don't care about privacy. "In my research, I found that teenagers live with this underlying anxiety of not knowing the rules of who can look at their information on the Internet. They think schools look at it, they think the government looks at it, they think colleges can look at it, they think employers can look at it, they think Facebook can see everything," says Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT who is the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. "It's the opposite of the mental state I grew up in. My grandmother took me down to the mailbox in Brooklyn every morning, and she would say, 'It's a federal offense for anyone to look at your mail. That's what makes this country great.' In the old country they'd open your mail, and that's how they knew about you." (Comment on this story.)

Data mining, Turkle argues, is a panopticon: the circular prison invented by 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham where you can't tell if you're being observed, so you assume that you always are. "The practical concern is loss of control and loss of identity," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's a little abstract, but that's part of what's taking place."

The Facebook and Google Troves

Our identities, however, were never completely within our control: our friends keep letters we've forgotten writing, our enemies tell stories about us we remember differently, our yearbook photos are in way too many people's houses. Opting out of all those interactions is opting out of society. Which is why Facebook is such a confusing privacy hub point. Many data-mining companies made this argument to me: How can I complain about having my Houston trip data-mined when I'm posting photos of myself with a giant mullet and a gold chain on Facebook and writing columns about how I want a second kid and my wife doesn't? Because, unlike when my data is secretly mined, I get to control what I share. Even narcissists want privacy. "It's the difference between sharing and tracking," says Bret Taylor, Facebook's chief technology officer.

To get into the Facebook office in Palo Alto, Calif., I have to sign a piece of physical paper: a Single-Party Non-Disclosure Agreement, which legally prevents me from writing the last paragraph. But your privacy on Facebook — that's up to you. You choose what to share and what circle of friends gets to see it, and you can untag yourself from any photos of you that other people put up. However, from a miner's point of view, Facebook has the most valuable trove of data ever assembled: not only have you told it everything you like, but it also knows what your friends like, which is an amazing predictor of what you'll like. (See "Your Thoughts About Facebook.")

Facebook doesn't sell any of your data, partly because it doesn't have to — 23.1% of all online ads not on search engines, video or e-mail run on Facebook. But data-mining companies are "scraping" all your personal data that's not set to private and selling it to any outside party that's interested. So that information is being bought and sold unless you squeeze your Facebook privacy settings tight, which keeps you from a lot of the social interaction that drew you to the site in the first place.

The only company that might have an even better dossier on you than Facebook is Google. In a conference room on the Google campus, I sit through a long privacy-policy PowerPoint presentation. Summary: Google cares! Specifically, Google keeps the data it has about you from various parts of its company separate. One category is the personally identifiable account data it can attach to your name, age, gender, e-mail address and ZIP code when you signed up for services like Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, iGoogle, Google Voice or Calendar. The other is log data associated with your computer, which it "anonymizes" after nine months: your search history, Chrome browser data, Google Maps requests and all the info its myriad data trackers and ad agencies (DoubleClick, AdSense, AdMob) collect when you're on other sites and Android phone apps. You can change your settings on the former at Google Dashboard and the latter at Google Ads Preferences — where you can opt out of having your data mined or change the company's guesses about what you're into.

Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel at Google, says the company created these tools to try to reassure people who have no idea how all this information is being collected and used. "When I go to TIME.com as a user, I think only TIME.com is collecting my data. What I don't realize is that for every ad on that page, a company is also dropping a code and collecting my data. It's a black box — and we've tried to open up the box. Sometimes you're not even sure who the advertisers are. It's just a bunch of jumping monkeys or something." Google really does want to protect your privacy, but it's got issues. First, it's profit-driven and it's huge. But those aren't the main reasons privacy advocates get so upset about Google. They get upset because the company's guiding philosophy conflicts with the notion of privacy. As the PowerPoint says right up top: "Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Which is awesome, except for the fact that my information is part of the world's information. (See "Quilting for Data: How Google Gets Information from Inside People's Heads.")

Tracking the Trackers
To see just what information is being gathered about me, I downloaded Ghostery, a browser extension that lets you watch the watchers watching you. Each time you go to a new website, up pops a little bubble that lists all the data trackers checking you out. This is what I discovered: the very few companies that actually charge you for services tend not to data mine much. When you visit TIME.com, several dozen tracking companies, with names such as Eyeblaster, Bluestreak, DoubleClick and Factor TG, could be collecting data at any given time.

If you're reading this in print as a subscriber, TIME has probably "rented" your name and address many times to various companies for a one-time use. This is also true if you subscribe to Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan or just about any other publication. (Comment on this story.)

This being America, I don't have to wait for the government to give me an opt-out option; I can pay for one right now. Michael Fertik, the CEO and founder of Reputation.com, who nabbed my Social Security number, will do it for me for just $8.25 a month. His company will also, for a lot more money, make Google searches of your name come up with more flattering results — because when everyone is famous, everyone needs a public relations department. Fertik, who clerked for the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit after graduating from Harvard Law School, believes that if data mining isn't regulated, everyone will soon be assigned scores for attractiveness and a social-prowess index and a complainer index, so companies can avoid serving you — just as you now have a credit score that they can easily check before deciding to do business with you. "What happens when those data sets are used for life transactions: health insurance, employment, dating and education? It's inevitable that all of these decisions will be made based on machine conclusions. Your FICO score is already an all-but-decisional fact about you. ABD, dude! All but decisional," says Fertik.

See how Apple and Google became the two most admired companies in the world.

See how social media is helping old media.

Even if I were to use the services of Reputation.com, there's still all the public information about me that I can't suppress. Last year, thousands of people sent their friends a Facebook message telling them to opt out of being listed on Spokeo.com, which they described as the creepiest paparazzo of all, giving out your age, profession, address and a photo of your house. Spokeo, a tiny company in Pasadena, Calif., is run by 28-year-old Stanford grad Harrison Tang. He was surprised at the outcry. "Some people don't know what Google Street View is, so they think this is magic," Tang says of the photos of people's homes that his site shows. The info on Spokeo isn't even all that revealing — he purposely leaves off criminal records and previous marriages — but Tang thinks society is still learning about data mining and will soon become inured to it. "Back in the 1990s, if you said, 'I'm going to put pictures on the Internet for everyone to see,' it would have been hard to believe. Now everyone does it. The Internet is becoming more and more open. This world will become more connected, and the distance between you and me will be a lot closer. If everybody is a walled garden, there won't be an Internet."

I deeply believe that, but it's still too easy to find our gardens. Your political donations, home value and address have always been public, but you used to have to actually go to all these different places — courthouses, libraries, property-tax assessors' offices — and request documents. "You were private by default and public by effort. Nowadays, you're public by default and private by effort," says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for digital rights. "There are all sorts of inferences that can be made about you from the websites you visit, what you buy, who you talk to. What if your employer had access to information about you that shows you have a particular kind of health condition or a woman is pregnant or thinking about it?" Tien worries that political dissidents in other countries, battered women and other groups that need anonymity are vulnerable to data mining. At the very least, he argues, we're responsible to protect special groups, just as Google Street View allows users to request that a particular location, like an abused-women's shelter, not be photographed. (See the top 10 Twitter moments of 2010.)

Other democratic countries have taken much stronger stands than the U.S. has on regulating data mining. Google Street View has been banned by the Czech Republic. Germany — after protests and much debate — decided at the end of last year to allow it but to let people request that their houses not be shown, which nearly 250,000 people had done as of last November. E.U. Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is about to present a proposal to allow people to correct and erase information about themselves on the Web. "Everyone should have the right to be forgotten," she says. "Due to their painful history in the 20th century, Europeans are naturally more sensitive to the collection and use of their data by public authorities."

After 9/11, not many Americans protested when concerns about security seemed to trump privacy. Now that privacy issues are being pushed in Congress, companies are making last-ditch efforts to become more transparent. New tools released in February for Firefox and Google Chrome browsers let users block data collecting, though Firefox and Chrome depend on the data miners to respect the users' request, which won't stop unscrupulous companies. In addition to the new browser options, an increasing number of ads have a little i (an Advertising Option Icon), which you can click on to find out exactly which companies are tracking you and what they do. The technology behind the icon is managed by Evidon, the company that provides the Ghostery download. Evidon has gotten more than 500 data-collecting companies to provide their info.

It takes a lot of work to find out about this tiny little i and even more to click on it and read the information. But it also took people a while to learn what the recycling symbol meant. And reading the info behind the i icon isn't necessarily the point, says Evidon CEO Scott Meyer, who used to be CEO of About.com and managed the New York Times' website. "Do I look at nutritional labeling? No. But would I buy a food product that didn't have one? Absolutely not. I would be really concerned. It's accountability." (See "Google Street View Goes Off-Roading.")

FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz has been pleased by how effective he's been at using the threat of legislation to scare companies into taking action and dropping their excuse that they don't know anything about you personally, just data associated with your computer. "We used to have a distinction 10 years ago between personally identifiable information and non-PII. Now those distinctions have broken down." In November, Leibowitz hired Edward Felten, the Princeton computer-science professor famous for uncovering weaknesses in electronic-voting machines and digital-music protection, to serve as the FTC's chief technologist for the next year. Felten has found that the online-advertising industry is as eager as the government is for improved privacy protections. "There's a lot of fear that holds people back from doing things they would otherwise do online. This is part of the cost of privacy uncertainty. People are a little wary of trying out some new site or service if they're worried about giving their information," Felten says.

He's right: oddly, the more I learned about data mining, the less concerned I was. Sure, I was surprised that all these companies are actually keeping permanent files on me. But I don't think they will do anything with them that does me any harm. There should be protections for vulnerable groups, and a government-enforced opt-out mechanism would be great for accountability. But I'm pretty sure that, like me, most people won't use that option. Of the people who actually find the Ads Preferences page — and these must be people pretty into privacy — only 1 in 8 asks to opt out of being tracked. The rest, apparently, just like to read privacy rules. (Comment on this story.)

We're quickly figuring out how to navigate our trail of data — don't say anything private on a Facebook wall, keep your secrets out of e-mail, use cash for illicit purchases. The vast majority of it, though, is worthless to us and a pretty good exchange for frequent-flier miles, better search results, a fast system to qualify for credit, finding out if our babysitter has a criminal record and ads we find more useful than annoying. Especially because no human being ever reads your files. As I learned by trying to find out all my data, we're not all that interesting.

— With reporting by Eben Harrell / London

You are in the very best of hands (part 2) - Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites

Not that I treat the HUFFPO as any great source of Journalism but my regard for FACEBOOK is about equal to how I regard the Taliban....Facebook is the dumbest of dumb things you can do.....Really, what part of your brain has to think that exposing all the personal details of your life online could be a positive experience???? REALLY.....I may rant and talk about stuff here, but there is no amount of real personal data here for anyone to gain....on Facebook, they can get every last detail about you and all your online " Friends"

NOW, they will let advertisers and others (who pay the right amount of $$$) to access all your personal data including cell phone number and addresses....

Face it, FACEBOOK will be looked back on in about 10 years as one of the stupidest things that people did and all the money/time/effort that was wasted on it....Think about how much speculative bull-shite they have gained due to people giving them money and thinking that money is well invested?? FACEBOOK has no product, no real value....it is all a bunch of bullcrap and others are making money off your personal info....what a scam.

People used to say, " KILL YOUR TV " as they thought it was sapping people's ability to think....I say " KILL YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT " while you can....really. You will thank me later on.


Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites
03/ 2/11 08:43 PM - HUFFPO

Facebook will be moving forward with a controversial plan to give third-party developers and external websites the ability to access users' home addresses and cellphone numbers in the face of criticism from privacy experts, users, and even congressmen.

Facebook quietly announced the new policy in a note posted to its Developer Blog in January. It suspended the feature just three days later following user outcry, while promising that it would be "re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks."

In response to a letter penned by Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) expressing concern over the new functionality, Facebook reaffirmed that it will be allowing third parties to request access to users' addresses and phone numbers.

Facebook noted that it is considering implementing controls that would more explicitly highlight the personal nature of the information being transmitted to applications and explained it is "actively considering" whether to restrict users under 18 years old from sharing their contact information with third-party developers.

"We expect that, once the feature is re-enabled, Facebook will again permit users to authorize applications to obtain their contact information," Facebook's Marne Levine, vice president of global public policy, wrote in the letter to Reps. Markey and Barton. "[H]owever, we are currently evaluating methods to further enhance user control in this area."

Facebook has attempted to tread a fine line with regard to privacy issues even as it has continuously pushed users to share more information, both on Facebook and beyond the social network.

The plan to open up users' address and phone numbers to third-party sites and services marks the latest frontier in Facebook's often controversy-fraught efforts to encourage users to be more liberal in sharing their data and online activity.

Even if the revamped feature were to include improved notifications and protections for minors, privacy experts warn the feature could imperil users' personal information and increase their risk of being targeted by scams, spam, and identity thieves.

Though Facebook prohibits applications from selling users' information or sharing it with advertisers and data brokers, malicious, rogue apps spreading phishing scams and other ruses are not uncommon on the social network. With just a few errant clicks, an unsuspecting user could potentially hand over her home address to a scammer peddling diet cures or free iPads in an effort to compile credit card data and other personal information.

"[Scammers] might be able to impersonate you if they had your phone number," said Norman Sadeh-Koniecpol, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. "They're saying, 'Please give us your phone number,' but they're not telling you whether they'll share it or whether they'll sell it or use if for malicious purposes. In fact, you don't know who you're dealing with."

Others are concerned with what they see as Facebook's willingness to change the rules of play--first encouraging people to share personal information with a more limited group of friends, then allowing that data to be accessed in new, unexpected ways.

"People never thought when they were posting this data [such as their phone numbers] that it would be accessible to anyone but friends. There's a real mismatch of expectations around that," said Mary Hodder, chairman of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. "Even if Facebook comes back with new protections, they're still saying, 'Hey, get over it, your data is public.' I feel badly for users that Facebook's approach is 'You give us anything and it's all fair game.'"

Despite the social network's intentions to make addresses and phone numbers accessible to developers, Rep. Markey offered Facebook measured praise for its response, while stressing the necessity of protecting younger users.

"I'm pleased that Facebook's response indicated that it's looking to enhance its process for highlighting for users when they are being asked for permission to share their contact information," Rep. Markey said in a statement. "I'm also encouraged that Facebook is deciding whether to allow applications on the site to request contact information from minors. I don't believe that applications on Facebook should get this information from teens, and I encourage Facebook to wall off access to teen's contact information if they enable this new feature."

UPDATE: Facebook has contacted The Huffington Post with the following statement:

Despite some rumors, there's no way for other websites to access a user's address or phone number from Facebook. For people that may find this option useful in the future, we're considering ways to let them share this information (for example to use an online shopping site without always having to re-type their address). People will always be in control of what Facebook information they share with apps and websites


Repeat after me......" Riiiiiiigggghhhhttt"