Starting now, you better pay pretty close attention to the dialog boxes that pop up when you try add third-party apps to Facebook. If you don't, you might end up giving them your address and phone number.
Eric Schmidt is a thoughtful speaker with impeccable educational credentials. But the Google CEO's been a creepy, arrogant-sounding disaster in the press lately, especially on television. Today he issued a retraction. Here are the lowlights of how this came about.
The chairmen of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus sent that nice young man from Facebook a letter about Facebook's problems with user information getting leaked out to advertisers through third-party apps. Good for them! I hope it was strongly worded.
At any moment, your computer could crash, and you will need to hand it over, unedited, to a repair person. If weird filenames freak out that person and the police, they can open your files, a court has ruled. Ugh.
What do you do if you're the CEO of a company faced with persistent privacy concerns? If you're Mark Zuckerberg, you make it so users of your service can't block you. Mark Zuckerberg recently, mysteriously, became unblockable on Facebook.
Google's co-founders ended up in a shouting match in front of subordinates during internal discussions over aggressive ad targeting, according to the Wall Street Journal. The pro-targeting side prevailed, and Google is now edging toward Facebook-level privacy standards. Ack.
