Image via CrunchBase
BeautifulPeople.com, the dating website which claims to only accept members who pass an attractiveness rating, is claiming in the media that it has been hit by a computer virus.
According to a press release issued by the website, it was hit by a virus called “Shrek” that made it possible for “30,000 ‘ugly’ people to invade the site.”
The story has been widely reported by the likes of The Guardian, The Telegraph, Fox News, The Daily Mail and many other media outlets.
A village in northern India has changed its name from that of a god to SnapDeal.com Nagar. The tiny town had good reason to, because SnapDeal, India’s version of Groupon, provided it with fresh water.
SnapDeal’s founder Kunal Bahl wanted to do something good with his company’s burgeoning profits, so like Bill Gates and his philanthropic efforts, the 28-year-old CEO looked for an opportunity where he could have the most bang for the buck.
His answer? Water. He found out that a mere $5,000 would install 15 hand pumps that would make it so the villagers wouldn’t have to walk nearly two miles just to get clean water. The result was life-changing, Bahl told CNN.
Image via CrunchBase
When Facebook revealed last year it was introducing facial recognition technology to help users tag their friends in photographs, they gave the functionality to North American users only.
Most of the rest of us found the option in our privacy settings was “not yet available”, which meant we could neither enable or disable it. We simply had to wait until Facebook decided to roll it out to our account.
Well, now might be a good time to check your Facebook privacy settings as many Facebook users are reporting that the site has enabled the option in the last few days without giving users any notice.
There are billions of photographs on Facebook’s servers. As your Facebook friends upload their albums, Facebook will try to determine if any of the pictures look like you. And if they find what they believe to be a match, they may well urge one of your Facebook friends to tag it with your name.
The tagging is still done by your friends, not by Facebook, but rather creepily Facebook is now pushing your friends to go ahead and tag you.
Remember, Facebook does not give you any right to pre-approve tags. Instead the onus is on you to untag yourself in any photo a friend has tagged you in. After the fact.
If this is something you’re uncomfortable with, disable “Suggest photos of me to friends” now.
Here’s how you do it.
* Go to your Facebook account’s privacy settings.
* Click on “Customise settings”.
* Under “Things others share” you should see an option titled “Suggest photos of me to friends. When photos look like me, suggest my name”.
* Unfortunately at this point you can’t tell whether Facebook has enabled the setting or not, you have to dig deeper..
* Click on “Edit settings”.
* If Facebook has enabled auto-suggestion of photo tags you will find the option says “Enabled”.
* Change it to “Disabled” if you don’t want Facebook to work that way.
* Press “OK”.
Earlier this year, Sophos wrote an open letter to Facebook. Amongst other things, we asked for “privacy by default” – meaning that there should be no more sharing of information without users’ express agreement (OPT-IN).
Unfortunately, once again, Facebook seems to be sharing personal information by default. Many people feel distinctly uncomfortable about a site like Facebook learning what they look like, and using that information without their permission.
Most Facebook users still don’t know how to set their privacy options safely, finding the whole system confusing. It’s even harder though to keep control when Facebook changes the settings without your knowledge.
The onus should not be on Facebook users having to “opt-out” of the facial recognition feature, but instead on users having to “opt-in”.
Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth.
You should also take some time to read our step-by-step advice on how best to configure your Facebook privacy settings.
Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com
Social Search a feature provided by Google combines regular search results with publicly available data of friends- friends would generally mean Google contacts, Google talk and other networks from Google account.
This feature was recently subjected to lot of controversy when Facebook a stiff competitor used a PR firm to release negative stories about Social Search to the press. Facebook claims that Google has been using Facebook data to run its service without Facebook’s permission.
Google has chosen to remain quiet on this issue and has mentioned only about Twitter in its blog post. Social Search shall be available in 19 more languages from next week, with more languages on the way. Google may probably not be allowed to enter facebook users communication as Facebook’s internal search engine Bing , from Microsoft, is the rival to Google search engine.
While the web is growing fast as a tool to search information about anything, Google will definitely grab its share from other companies. As Google is the search engine powerhouse and as people trust Google’s results this is definitely a smart move from Google’s perspective.
Source :- http://www.clickindia.com
