While I’m working on a Facebook inspired privacy discovery project, I need to highly recommend that everyone take the time to review their the official Facebook privacy settings page to understand how data about you is used and shared, but in a nutshell Facebook tells us:
Your name, profile picture, gender and networks are always open to everyone. We suggest leaving the other basic settings below open to everyone to make it easier for real world friends to find and connect with you.
You need to understand that this lack of privacy also makes you *more* available to their advertisers, which is what they’re really pushing for, identity theft and other potential crimes (ie- stalking). You need to login to Facebook and then click on the text Account on the top left side of the screen, and then choose Privacy Settings in that dropdown. (or if you’re logged in, click here). Take a look at these screen shots below, first is the Recommended settings Facebook presents to you:
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LinkedIn is spamming all of my Gmail contacts
Linkedin...good idea, bad idea?
UPDATE2 I finally got a response on Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 7:24 AM, it said, “I would first like to apologize for the delay in responding to your inquiry. This is certainly not the customary wait time for a reply from LinkedIn Customer Support. We have been experiencing higher than expected volumes, and your patience is greatly appreciated.” So, they’ve been so busy that it took 2 1/2 weeks to get back to me? Still, they haven’t answered my questions, one what happened and two, who did they email on my behalf? I need a list. Stay tuned.
UPDATE today is October 17, 2011, so it’s been a week since I’ve reported my problem, and I have not gotten anything back from LinkedIn support. Pathetic.
Today is October 12, 2011, so first off, if you have recently recieved a LinkedIn request from me; I apologize for this. I used the “See Who You Already Know on LinkedIn” (they claim to be able to pull contacts from over 39 providers) on LinkedIn to find new people to connect with in Gmail contact list. It found over 400 of them, so I chose a few of them to email, and it emailed ALL OF THEM and more. This included people I’m already linked in to, technology related mailing lists that I’m on, email alaises for my domain (?) and deceased relatives…it’s really a disaster. Oh, I’ve gotten 5 requests FROM MYSELF to connect, and it even posted on my blog, via the DISQUS comment system, as me, but only to one old post. Plus today it sent a followup, presumably to everyone it emailed the other day, and was nice enough to update the thread on my site, reminding me of the contact request. My support requests to LinkedIn haven’t been answered and it’s been almost 36 hours, my support history looks like this: