| * LinkedIn, Facebook: No one who cares about privacy
| at all could possibly use LinkedIn or Facebook or GMail
| or Chrome or anything else from Google. That's the simple
| fact of the matter.
|
| They only compromise privacy as much as users allow them to. The default
| settings are awful and need to be changed but they know that few users
| will take the time to do so. Tracking needs to be disabled and
| advertising needs to be blocked. It's not all that different than
| putting yourself on the Do Not Call list, filtering out the problem
| posters and tea-baggers on alt.home.repair and other Usenet groups,
| having an unlisted phone number, and opting out of direct mail
| advertising. Yes it requires a small amount of effort, but there are
| benefits to sites like LinkedIn as well.
|

Putting yourself on the Do Not Call list does not
involve first publishing details of your private life.
With LinkedIn you're voluntarily posting your resume.
With Facebook you're allowing an advertising company
to host much of your social life. I'm continually
astonished that people go along with that. But it's
not entirely mysterious. Online ad companies have
used two very successful strategies:

1) Bring on the sleaze very slowly. (When Facebook
first came out it was presented as just a free, personal
bulletin board. Though "Zuck" himself famously said
something to the effect that people were idiots for
signing up. And that was back in his Harvard days.
Google, likewise, started as an honest company that
seemed almost heroic in the face of sleazy Microsoft.
They made plenty of money running an honest business
with contextual ads and no spying.... That was then.)

2) Do everything possible to support peoples' laziness.
Most people *want* to not know about the sleaze
because they like the service. It's a don't-ask-don't-
tell approach. As Herbert Marcuse famously described
much of what goes on in American culture, there's a
"toilet assumption". If you can't see it, it's not there.

Many people want to use these services. That's up
to them. If you want to believe you can also maintain
privacy that's up to you. But when you start telling people
they can maintain privacy just by setting Zuck's ever-
changing privacy settings you're misleading not only
yourself but also others.

First, most people simply can't
manage to adjust settings like that. It's not that they're
stupid. The settings just tend to be complex, deliberately
obfuscated and require some study to understand. Computers
in general also require a kind of linear thinking that many
people are uncomfortable with.

Second, it's nearly impossible to even know what you're
dealing with. Did you know that Facebook has buttons on
most major websites, and that those buttons are set in
invisible iframes? An iframe is an HTML tag. The gist of it
is that the Facebook button you see on, say, nyt.com is
actually a webpage that you are tricked into visiting. That
allows Facebook to run script, set 1st-party cookies, and
track your image loading on almost every site you visit. If
you're also a Facebook member they'll have no trouble
connecting that data to you, so that they know almost
everything you do online. They're already working on that
as part of their advertising business -- to sell you out to
advertisers on a far more broad scale than just in terms
of what you actually post to Facebook itself. They want
to track patterns between the ads they show you and
what you buy, so that they can then claim to have
evidence that their ads work.... justifying high ad rates.

How do you deal with that? Did you know about iframes?
Did you know Facebook uses them? Do you block all frames
in webpages? If you do then many sites won't work. If you
don't then how can you stop their tracking? The only hope
would be to put facebook in your HOSTS file. But you can't
do that and still post your vacation pictures for "everyone
and his brother" to look at.

Facebook buttons in iframes is just one small example of
an increasingly ingenious and dishonest trend toward spying
on you constantly, selling you out to both business and
gov't. The strategy employs some very obscure tactics:
Iframes, supercookies, Flash cookies, unique browser ID
derived from the accept header that the browser sends to
websites.... That's assuming you already block the worst
problems: script and cookies. But you clearly don't because
if you did you wouldn't be able to use Facebook.

What I'm trying to say is that you don't know how much
you don't know. Yet you think you're protecting your privacy
by having made "a small amount of effort". Most people
simply won't make the effort you've made. They'll shoot
the messenger, teasing you about tin foil hats. Anyone who
does make the effort will be misled by your instructions
into thinking that their privacy can be assured given a
few minutes of effort. I can at least understand the motives
of people who are lazy and don't want to know how bad
it all is. But you're lying to yourself more than they are,
thinking you're protecting privacy while you willingly have
an advertising company host your social life!

I have a privacy tips page I make available for people
who are interested. But even that is just a start. It's a
big topic:

http://www.jsware.net/jsware/privacytips.php5

In ending my little diatribe, allow me to leave you with
a rather chilling quote from that page. This is something
I saw quoted from Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook.
She said that Facebook "enables brands to find their voices… and
to have genuine, personal relationships with their customers" ...
"to make marketing truly social".

She's defining spyware-based corporate advertising as
a warm and fuzzy service that makes social connections.
In other words, Pepsi and Ford are your good friends, and
Sheryl is such a dear that she's going to help you connect
with each other, for free!
These people are poorly socialized, amoral individuals. If
they were just crooks the whole thing would be easier. It's
far more insidious than that. They like to think they're doing
good while they grab money with both hands.