Group items tagged

A series of private pictures of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have been posted online by "hackers" to highlight a bug in the social network. In total 14 pictures of Mr Zuckerberg were posted to image site Imgur under the headline: "It's time to fix those security flaws Facebook".

Although some people have no problem whatsoever with flaunting themselves on facebook, effectively giving up on their right to privacy, some people do appreciate their privacy something that lately seems to be inexistent for facebook users. As mentioned in the following article: http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/facebook-having-devoured-your-privacy-wants-more, facebook are slowly implementing a new feature that will suggest events your friends are attending even if you were not invited. This latest facebook bug goes to show how easy it is for someone to lose their privacy on the internet as even facebook founder and creator Mark Zuckerburg is susceptible. Hopefully this "small" incident will increase facebook's concern for protecting their users' privacy and increase its security after complaints that privacy settings are not functioning properly and various users being victims of phising attacks.

"Hackers have stolen the personal data of 35 million users of the South Korean social network Cyworld and search engine Nate, the company that runs them SK Communications has admitted."

This article talks about the theft of personal details such as email addresses, phone numbers and passwords, despite having been encrypted. This article brings up the ethical issues of privacy, reliability and security, showing that even though precautions such as encryption were taken to avoid such incidents, private and confidential information was still hacked. It questions the reliability and the security of online systems which store private data in databases, and will no doubt discourage people from using or providing personal information to such websites. Though the incident can be overcome by asking users to "reset those credentials", the theft presents the possibility of increased amounts of spamming and phishing, therefore actions should be taken to inform and protect users from becoming victims of such scams. The following website gives suggestions on how to protect yourself against phishing: http://www.focus.com/fyi/44-ways-protect-phishing/

The main social and ethical in this article would have to be authenticity, as it deals with the fact that people are making accounts to be real people. In my own experience I've had this happen to me once and it was easily identified for the reasons this article states, no status updates etc. Although in my case it was harmless, it can lead to issues of a greater significance. This article also highlights the worrying ease at which people can fake an accout and that there is a very significant number of these accounts. They could in some cases be used in a harmful manner. For example, sexual predators could easily make a profile pretending to be 15 years old, add a profile picture of a child and then add other children as friends. This creates a security issue as the children's life is in a potentially harmful situation, as these cases of sexual predators over the internet has been a security issue since social networks came to be. Another issue that lack of authenticity brings is that these fake accounts could be used for spam, and could also potentially be used to spread malware. This is a very common problem in Facebook as these fake accounts can share a link with their "friends" and from this it starts spreading throughout the entire social network.

The news article shows some very important facts for instance, out of 5.3m teenagers in the UK more than half a million of them have suffered from cyber bullying. Furthermore, as social networks are now becoming more available on mobile devices this number is likely to increase in the coming years.

Nowadays lots of cyber bullying is going on, and it is increasing. Not only cyber bullying exists via text messages, yet also through anonymous calls and what is increasing a lot now, via social networks. People create facebook pages with names such as 'The ugliest person in Cascais' (this is probably an example of one of the 'less worse') and post images of people, with insulting descriptions on the photos. This is a big issue since people who are bullied may psychologically or even physically suffer from this. "half a million of them had been a victim of online bullying.". Technology is increasing, so surely, if no one tries to actually do something to change this, cyber bullying will also increase.

I'm a bit surprised at the number, it's lower than what I thought it would be. Perhaps I'm just a pessimist. Nevertheless, I agree with Ines. We're getting more and more cyber bullying, Stopping cyber bullying has proved difficult with the exponential growth of social networking. Cyber bullying is of course as we know, the use of the Internet or text messaging to bully others. But what can we do to change this escalation of cyber bullying? Not a whole lot really, in my opinion. Kids will, unsurprisingly, bully each other. The Facebook-generation is merely using the medium they are given.

I find, in this scenario, Facebook's behaviour immoral. They have known of this problem for three years, and they have yet to produce any progress. Facebook does not seem to respect one's stance on these things. If you wish the picture deleted, then it should be deleted.

The apparent deletion of photos takes place by the elimination "all of the metadata for the photo as well as any and all tagging and linking information. For all practical purposes, the photo no longer exists. However, technically, the bits that make up the photo persist somewhere. It's possible that someone who previously had access to a photo and saved the direct URL from the CDN (...) could still access the photo." http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/2493/how-long-does-facebook-keep-data-of-a-deleted-account In the article, "Wolens claims that Facebook is on the verge of fixing up its content systems so that "deleted" photos are really, truly deleted from the CDN within 45 days." However, the reliability of this claim is compromised by Facebook's Terms of Service, which every user must comply prior to creating an account. Summing up, it grants Facebook the right to do whatever they like with old content. They can even sublicense it: "You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and DISTRIBUTE (through multiple tiers), any User Content." http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.html Note the contradictions with the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998: "If you collect data about people for one reason, you can not use it for another; You can not give people's data to other people or

...organizations unless they agree;" http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act I get the impression that through blurring the ownership of intellectual property and personal records, social networks have some ulterior motives. The following passage in the article suggests the photos could, in fact, be instantly deleted from the CDN databases: "(Amusingly, after publishing the 2010 followup, Facebook appeared to delete my photos from its CDN that I had linked in the piece. (...) Other "deleted" photos that I had saved links to-ones that weren't from my account and were deleted even earlier than mine-remained online.)" Zuckerberg counterargues: "trust us, we're not doing this to profit from you, it's so we are legally protected as we enable you to share content with other users and services." http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.html In the end, it is in the hands of the user to control what is shared and given up ownership of.

hmm nice!

very nice!

This is an excellent choice of article. Your choice of tags is spot on. You may find this interesting: http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/

Thank you. Brilliant website that one. Was quite amused about the fact you can enter capitalism.org in China. I would've thought they banned that one. : )