Category: Web Life

Posted on

Bye Bye Facebook

As you may have noticed, Facebook has been copping a great deal of flak in the media lately for recent changes to its privacy policy.  There is growing evidence that Facebook as a company has few scruples or ethics when it comes to the way they view and use your personal data.  The company has continually “baited and switched” the privacy settings in Facebook to the point where they have become so confusing and complex that few people truly understand them.  There are something like 50 choices leading to about 170 different privacy variations possible, all needing to made in multiple locations in Facebook, with very little consistency or “expected behaviour” between them…  consequently, there could be significant parts of your personal data that is being made public without you realising. Facebook seems to be working on the principle that most users never look at the default settings or take the time to think through their options.  The most recent changes made to their privacy policy have made the sharing of your personal information “opt-out”, rather than the previous method of “opt-in”.  This means that, unless you wade through the many privacy settings to turn them off, you are probably sharing far more than you realise. Added to this is the recent change to the Facebook Privacy Policy that essentially grants Facebook the rights to give your data to third parties and advertisers in order to target marketing to you.  The infographic to the right was created by Matt McKeon, and links to his page where you can explore an interactive version which shows how the default sharing policy on Facebook has changed over time.  It’s a bit scary!

Interestingly, the Facebook Privacy Policy –which all Facebook users must agree to in order to use the service – has grown to become almost 6000 words long.  Do you know what it says?

Personally, I find this unethical behaviour completely unacceptable and, along with many others across the web, have decided to close my Facebook account.  Like many Facebook users, there have been times when I’ve found the service useful in helping me connect to friend and family, but their recent display of unethical, almost fascist, behaviour has left me with little choice but to cancel the service.  Although I had taken the time in the past to secure my Facebook account (and I was savvy enough to do so) I cannot, in principle, support a company that shows such a cavalier attitude to the privacy of their user base.

If you are a Facebook user, I would strongly encourage you to check the settings in your account to make sure they are doing what you expect.  There is a useful tool at http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
that will actually probe your Facebook account to show you how it looks to the outside world.  I would strongly encourage you to take the time to check yours.

There is also much bigger issues about Facebook. Its disregard for open standards, its walled garden approach that continually borrows steals ideas from all over the web, its willingness to do whatever it takes to keep users within the Facebook environment… I believe in the longer term will be bad for the Internet in general. That’s a much bigger issue and beyond the scope of this particular post, but when you add it all up, I can’t in all good faith continue to support a company that continually exhibits evil motives.  Facebook might be a useful service for many, and it might offer a certain convenience factor by bringing things into one place, but there is no doubt in my mind that Facebook will bad for the open web in the longer term.

Many people in the Internet community are so outraged by the continual display of unethical behaviour of Facebook and their CEO Mark Zuckerberg that here is an official “Quit Facebook Day” organised for May 31.

If you feel strongly enough about the approach that Facebook is taking, you may also decide to close your account to send a message to the company that you are not willing to use a service that shows such scant concern for their users privacy.

Here are just a few articles (of many!) about the recent changes that you may want to read if you need more information.  It’s worth getting the full story.

I realise that many people find Facebook very useful, and many will not want to take the extreme step of deleting their account, but I do hope you take the time to make sure your account is sharing what you think it is, and to even perhaps share some of this conversation with your students.

Posted on

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

If there’s one thing I hate it’s when people assume I’m an idiot and try to rip me off.

So when I got home today I opened the mailbox (yes, the real one!) to find this letter from a company called the Domain Renewal Group.  Their letter – which looked very much like an invoice –  was addressed to me as the owner of the domain betchablog.com and kindly informed me that this domain was due for renewal soon and that I should pay this as soon as possible.  The wording on the letter said that “the domain name registration is due to expire in the next few months“… and that… “Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity.”

All of that is true.  Betchablog.com IS coming up for renewal, and I DO need to renew it. The problem is that Domain Renewal Group are NOT my domain registrar, and they never have been.  I happen to have all of my various domains registered with GoDaddy, and I’ve never even heard of this other mob.

A closer reading of the letter reveals that all of the statements in their letter are technically correct, but written in such as way as to be misleading and underhanded in their deceptiveness.  The letter reads just like a regular renewal notice, but is in fact a transfer and renewal notice.  By signing it and sending it back with payment it would authorise them not just to renew the domain, but to take the domain away from the current registrar and move it their overpriced services.  How overpriced?  Well, I just took a look at GoDaddy’s site and it seems the going rate for a new .com domain is USD$10.69.  Their price for a domain transfer with 12 months renewal is only USD$6.99.  For the same thing, the Domain Renewal Group were about to charge unsuspecting or careless domain owners AUD$45 (about USD$41.50).

The thing is, there are many organisations where the bills are often paid by a different department to the ones that register the domains, that wouldn’t even question such an invoice when it arrived. The wording is sneaky enough, and the format looks enough like an invoice, that many people would just pay it without even questioning it.  I find this notion of trying to trick people into doing things they don’t mean to do is an appalling business practice.

There happened to be a Toronto-based phone number on the form so I rang it using Skype. The guy who answered asked what he could help me with, so I told him that I was very unimpressed with this deceptive and misleading way of doing business.   He sounded both surprised that someone would bother to call just to complain, but judging from his tone this was not the first time he’d had a complaint about it.  His response was a careless, “Like, whatever”, but he incorrectly assumed that there is nothing I can do about it other than complain.

He forgets that we live in an age where everyone is a publisher. He stupidly neglects to consider that the very customer base they are trying to mislead – those domain owners who own blogs and websites – are the exact same people who own their very own “personal printing presses” in the forms of blogs.  If you’re going to pull this scam-like crap on people, how stupid do you have to be to do it to people who can publicly tell the world about it?

My advice?  NEVER do business with the Domain Renewal Group.  Tell your friends never to do business with the Domain Renewal Group. And if I did have any domains registered with them I would be immediately transferring them elsewhere.

Posted on

Big Twitter, Little Twitter

This video just went live today from New Zealand’s wonderful EdTalks collection.  I’d forgotten all about it, but it was recorded back in October at the ULearn conference in New Zealand.  It’s kind of weird looking back at things you said many months ago and had forgotten you’d even said.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s a few thoughts about the use of Twitter for ongoing professional development, and some musings about how kids might use it (or something like it) to develop good digital citizenship skills.