Facebook has been in the media lately, everyone complaining about privacy in Facebook. To be honest, I never thought much about it, I signed up for Facebook with the knowledge that everything I put there would be public. However, today, I found something so disturbing that it makes me not to want to ever use Facebook again.
Today, I logged into my Facebook account, from a computer used by many people in our home. Usually, when I get to the Facebook home screen, I start typing in my credentials (email address and password) into the fields, however, today, someone had fiddled with the monitor settings, and I started fixing them. While this happened, I noticed that I had been logged into my account. Now, it’s bad enough that Facebook seems to like to automatically check the box saying keep me logged in, but to automatically log me into my Facebook account, is horrid. Sure, it may be okay if it’s just my personal computer, but if that’s the case, I would have leave me signed in checked already. I than rushed to try this on several other web browsers and computers, to my amazement, I had the same experience on all of them. As such, I deleted all of my cookies with Facebook in their names, and this fixed the issue. But now I need to figure out what to do from here. I certainly can never log into Facebook from a public computer again, but if they’re willing to do ville things like that with their cookies, I don’t want them on even my private computers.
I had heard of Facebook doing nasty things like this in the past, such as scanning to see what email accounts you were signed into. However, that never affected me, not to mention I never really looked for confirmation, so they always just seemed like urban legends. Hopefully, Facebook will soon revise their cookies, making this point moot, and I’ll update you if that does happen, however, the fact still stands, that website has been making mistake after mistake, and this one was the rock dropping at terminal velocity that broke the camels back. Not only is Facebook notorious for leaking your information, it will now log you into your account, even if there’s someone sitting in front of your computer that’s not you. Facebook, I give you an F.
For several blog posts now, I have talked about archiving micro-blog posts. There has been many ways to try to do this, however, I now believe that I have found a good solution. Previously, I have tried to do things such as using Twitter Tool, which will take my weekly tweets from twitter, and post them as a blog post on this blog once a week. However, this doesn’t catch all of my microblog posts. As such, I now have a solution, although it is a bit of a cobble. Introducing 