This Week In Social Media

It has been a bad week for Social Media and Privacy.  First, LinkedIn decided that they'd emulate Facebook's utter disregard for their members' privacy by enabling anyone you're associated with to use your images and details in their advertising.

To disable this reduction in your privacy and copyright, in LinkedIn, click on your name and go to Settings, then click on the Account option on the left and then Manage Social Advertising.  Uncheck the "LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising" box that LinkeIn has checked for you by default when they introduced this feature.

Now, as if Facebook could allow some other social media site to invade your privacy without having an invasion of their own!  So, Facebook decided to one-up LinkedIn and make available to others the phone numbers of all of your friends, whether they are on Facebook or not.  I don't recall them asking me if this was what I wanted...

To disable this invasion of your friends and colleagues privacy, you need to click on Account, Edit Friends, then Contacts over on the left.  Now, click on the "this page" link over on the right and click the "Remove" button.  Also, on your iPhone, in Facebook's main menu, click the Friends icon, then click the Sync icon (arrow in a box) and then "Sync Contacts".  From here you can set syncing to on or off and can also remove any synced data.

Now, I have no issue with people HAVING the choice as to whether they use these features or not, however I DO have an issue with these privacy invading features being introduced and enabled by default, especially when their introduction isn't made well known to all their members.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie