Posts Tagged ‘Disability’

Facebook changes privacy settings for millions of users – facial recognition is enabled

Published by pratyushkp on June 8th, 2011 - in Social, Technology

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

  • Facebook changes privacy settings for millions of users – facial recognition is enabled (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
  • Facebook Unveils Facial Recognition To the World, Remains Opt-Out (readwriteweb.com)
  • Facebook rolls out facial-recognition tool (news.cnet.com)
  • Facebook quietly switches on facial recognition tech by default (go.theregister.com)
  • Security Firm Issues Alert on Facebook Facial Recognition (pcworld.com)
  • Facebook Party Gets Out Of Control After German Girl Forgets Privacy Setting (blogoholic.in)
  • Hypocritical Facebook scores PR own-goal with sleazy attack on Google privacy (pratyushkp.wordpress.com)

Twitter Reverts to Old Format after Server Woes

Published by pratyushkp on April 7th, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Disables New Twitter and Trends, shifts servers to a different location

Earlier in the week, Twitter page announced that it was experiencing trouble displaying home timelines. That was followed by a message declaring, “We’ve temporarily disabled #NewTwitter. Our engineers are working on re-enabling it and we’ll update you shortly,” which led to another update minutes later that announced that Twitter was “Temporarily Disabling Trends” as well. Something is terribly wrong in Twitter land then.

Apparently, Twitter was either in the process of introducing or had already launched a new homepage that departed from the “discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” spin of the current homepage and took on a new avatar that invited users to “follow your interests”. The new interest centric search suggests users to follow categories and will throw up results with accounts dealing with the sought categories, instead of just dishing out account names bearing the search phrase.

However, users were greeted with either the pre-redesign version of Twitter or an error message that said “something is technically wrong” with Twitter and “back to normal soon”. The root of Twitter’s woes can be traced out to an announcement proclaiming that all of its server infrastructure would be moved to a new secret location, which is in Utah by the way. After the teething troubles with the brand new server farms, Twitter has been forced to move most of the same infrastructure back to its facility in Sacramento, California.

It seems the server relocation to the new Utah site hasn’t worked out quite as well as Twitter had intended, which put a spanner in the works of all the new features that had been touted in September last year. Reverting to the old format and axing the new features may have got Twitter working again, but that’s not a healthy sign. Twitter will have to be a lot more circumspect with the load testing and debugging of the new additions, before unleashing them prematurely on unsuspecting users.

  • Twitter Reverts to Old Interface (utwitterit.com)
  • New Twitter Homepage Starts With A Fail, Returns For Some Users (blogherald.com)
  • Twitter breaks after server problems (telegraph.co.uk)
  • Twitter.com Gets New Homepage Design (Screenshot) (mt-soft.com.ar)
  • Twitter disables new version of website (canada.com)
  • Twitter Search Is Now Three Times Faster (mashable.com)
  • Twitter disables new version of website (msnbc.msn.com)
  • Twitter Steps Into the Wayback Machine (mashable.com)
  • Twitter Delays Homepage Revamp After Service Glitch (pcworld.com)
  • Twitter disables new version of website (reuters.com)
Tags: , , Sacramento California, Server (computing), , , Utah,
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