Light at the end of the tunnel?

Facebook bows to user protest and allows full account deletion. Interesting, interesting. I’ve not looked into their new system yet but sufficient to say, it looks like it may be considerable easier to get out of Facebook’s clutches than previously.

Been somewhat silent here again, my apologies. I’ve been interviewing and plowing through the reading for my essays and the possible ideas for my thesis. The last taught semester of my MSc. is going faster than I expected it!

I am appearing every so often over at Law Librarians. The experiement is going quite well and we have quite a global community. Lo-fi librarian has an update on our progress and a small list of who is who.

Further Facebook Privacy Problems

Hrrm. Facebook is currently being investigated by the Information Commissioner’s Office in regards to their data collection policies.

Turns out that even when you delete your profile (and no, I have not deleted mine yet), the data remains on their servers. Apparently, this is to aid you as the user should you ever want to reactivate your account but currently fails the general rule of Data Protection of not keeping information for longer than it is required.

It seems the only way to permanently delete your information is to clear out each individual section yourself before deactivating your account. Which puts the onus on the individual.

As I keep a fairly clean profile, that’s not the worst thing for me but it still rankles. And I’m still not entirely sure if that means that I have to trawl across my friends’ profiles removing any wall posts etc. I may have left on their profiles as well.

Not on, Facebook. Not on.

Facebook: politics and pondering

With Friends Like These…: Interesting article from the Guardian on the politics and philosophy behind Facebook and sufficient to say, the politics certainly do not match my own.

It’s certainly something to consider - I am not entirely happy with my Facebook use. It isn’t really doing a great deal for me but it’s certainly doing something for the people that benefit financially from my use of it. Plus, there isn’t actually anyone on my friends list (which v. small because I…have no interest in getting in contact with the people I barely knew at school.) that I don’t have contact with via other means so deleting my profile would not be the end of my world as I know it.

And I can still play Scrabble elsewhere.

And yes, I am well aware that the same people are behind Paypal but Paypal has an actual use for me and I am very aware of my shortcomings re: strictly following an ideology. Pros and cons are always something I consider and for the moment, I will continue to use Paypal.