security

Facebook Should Give Up on Privacy

By Mark Evans in Social Media 5 Comments Tags: , , ,

After watching Facebook make so many missteps when it comes to privacy over the past couple of years, including how some leading game developers passed along user data to marketers, I’ve come to the conclusion it should just throw in the towel.

Forget about tweaking privacy settings so they’re easier to control, manipulate, configure or understand. Forget about having to worry if new services make more personal data public so that search engines can discover it so Facebook can serve up more pages to display more ads. Forget privacy settings altogether.

Facebook should just make everything public. Anything you post, share, like, comment on or message would be public data, available to anyone. It would make Facebook’s job so much easier not having to worry about pesky issues such as privacy. And it’s what Mark Zuckerberg really wants to create a more transparent, open world.

If Facebook went completely public, life would be easier for everyone. First, we’d all know the rules. There would be no ambiguities, no confusion, no surprises. Anything posted on Facebook would be public, making it even social because there’s nothing like sharing everything with 500 million of your closest friends…or friends of friends.

For Facebook, privacy is a headache so let’s turf it. Right now, Facebook wants to eat its cake and have it too when it comes to privacy. It wants to make a lot of data public to drive its business needs but, at the same time, it needs to meet the needs of consumers who want the ability to make some or most of their information private.

Perhaps the solution is a new service called Facebook Private. On FBP, everything is private other than what your friends can see. There’s no worry about privacy settings because anyone you decide to let into your FBP network would have access, putting the onus the user to be selective about who let in to their inner circle.

With FBP launched, Facebook could then make the old Facebook completely public because users would have a clear about what service best fit their needs. At the end of the day, everyone would be much happier.

Does this make sense or what?

A Wake-Up Call About Data and Privacy

By Mark Evans in Social Media, Uncategorized 1 Comment Tags: , , , ,

In toiling away on the content for mesh ’10 over the past several months, the focus has been on coming up on great keynotes, panels and workshops, as well as attracting people to turn our ideas into reality.

It wasn’t until mesh started that I really became aware of a major theme: the realization that we have so much of our personal and professional data on the Web, and how we spend little or no time thinking about whether this information is secure and protected. I would argue that most of us have optimistic faith that all will be digitally good, which explains why protecting our personal identities and our data is an after-thought – if we think about it at all.

After sitting in on several mesh panels and workshops, I now realize how lazy and cognizant I’ve been about my digital assets, and whether they are protected properly.

During his keynote yesterday, Joseph Menn, for example, talked about how a growing number of cyber-terrorists are focused on hacking into financial and banking systems. We’re not talking about small-time digital hoods but organized crime armed with sophisticated technology.

Adele McAlear did a workshop about what happens to our digital assets (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr accounts) when we pass away. She talked about a 32-year-old who died in this sleep but left no information about how friends or family could get into his social media accounts to keep them alive.

As well, Paypal CEO Scott Thompson provided more insight about the importance of digital security, and how Paypal has sophisticated anti-fraud and security systems to protect its 89 million members. It made me consider whether Paypal is a better way to make online transactions than using a credit card. Of course, this is based on the belief Paypal’s ant-fraud and security systems are rock-solid.

The reality is our personal and professional usage of the Web is going to grow so security is going to become even more important. For me, mesh serves as a serious wake-up call.

WordPress Takes It On the Chin

By Mark Evans in Blogs 10 Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Over the weekend, Robert Scoble had a public (and well warranted) temper tantrum after his WordPress blog was hacked. Not surprisingly, the experience left him upset and digitally vulnerable. But what really disappointed Scoble was WordPress’ casual and, arguably, cavalier, reaction it could have been avoided if he had upgraded to version 2.8.4.

This led to a lively discussion on Friendfeed between Scoble and WordPress domo Matt Mullenweg.

Looking back, WordPress was technically correct in stating that blog users must be diligent by upgrading to avoid any security attacks. There’s a never-ending war going on between software makers and hackers, software makers new to keep counter-attacking.

That said, WordPress dropped the ball by publicly “shrugging its shoulders” with the you should have upgraded message. When your blog has been hacked, the last thing you want to be told is you’ve done something wrong by not upgrading.

From a PR perspective that doesn’t help the situation or make anyone feel any better about things. Instead, many WordPress users wanted to be told what to do, how to fix things, and whether there was anything else they should be worried about such as rogue plug-ins.

If there are lessons to be learned, WordPress has to be more pro-active approach to Web security. If it’s not safe to use versions of WordPress that may only be a few weeks old, then WordPress has to really spread the word – and more than a short message on the WordPress dashboard.

As Elliott Ng suggests, WordPress also needs to create a directory or system that identifies what plug-ins are “safe and which ones are funky”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m big WordPress fan and user, and respect the work that Mullenweg has done to create and evangelize the technology. But WordPress needs to re-load on how it handles security, and how it deals with its millions of users from a communications and PR perspective.

More: Daring Fireball has some thoughts, including an observation that Movable Type users don’t get penalized for not upgrading, while econsultancy’s Patricio Robles offers some security tips.

(Note: This blog was hacked a couple of weeks ago, apparently by Black Hat SEO hackers. As you can imagine, it spooked me about the security of everything I do online, not just my WordPress blogs.)


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