(Another) Attack on Facebook Privacy Policy

Facebook is 500 Million Strong

Sometime this week Facebook will hit the 500 million user mark.

This makes it bigger than the combined population of the USA & Canada.

To celebrate they will be launching Facebook stories a demonstration of the way Facebook has changed people’s lives.

Each story will be limited to around 420 characters (the current limit for status updates) and if you’re story is more popular than others (has more ‘Likes’) then it’ll be visible amongst other most popular stories (think Trending Topics on Twitter).

Facebook already have a way you can submit your own story.

The question is, with Facebook continuing to grow and dominate the social networking landscape, what will it take for people to move elsewhere?



Being Sunday, this post is a little bit late but as ever it’s great!

First track is a 2010 modernisation of a trance classic, maintaining all the essential items of the original and improving the rest. A brilliant track.

Ralphie B – Massive (Midway Remix)

Bonus

Because we’re not all about dance music, here’s an absolute classic that is guaranteed you pick you up no matter how delicate you’re feeling on a Sunday morning

The Beatles – Come Together

Ralphie B (Midway) Myspace

The Beatles website

I’ve recently watched & read two things that got my thinking about privacy & visibility on the internet.

Erasing David is a true documentary about a father who decides to go “underground” and avoid detection for a month. He hires a team of private investigators to track him down. I don’t want to give too much away but suffice to say it didn’t take as long as you may think!

The other was the book -  Roadside Crosses by Jeffery Deaver. Both of which I highly recommend whether you buy from Amazon (above links), beg, borrow or download (steal) them.

Both deal with privacy and the amount of information that is accessible to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection.

Albeit fictional, Roadside Crosses creates a world where someone is groomed, targeted & tortured purely from the information they post about online.

We all know people who we know post far too much information online about themselves … but don’t you think we’re all guilty of this to a certain extent?

Remember how weird it was to see your house & street for the first time on Google Maps / Google Earth? Well that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

Google have a free tool where anyone can signup and choose to be alerted (via RSS or email) whenever a webpage, social network (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc.)  contains a particular keyphrase.

Professional internet marketers use this to monitor their brand, product or names of key individuals within the company. But unscrupulous users can just as easily use it to keep tabs on anyone they choose.

I’ll use myself as an example

I mention my name on the About page.  From the title tags of the main domain you could guess that I’m based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. Therefore you can also probably find my personal Facebook page, where you can see a picture of me.

I have my profile set to private but imagine if you had left open to public viewing … you’d have access to my photo’s, videos, friends, siblings, parents, date of birth, hometown and age.

Not to mention my wall postings which may or may not be professionally comprimising / embarrasing.

So What?

Well exactly, so what? Let’s remember that you’ve got Google Alerts running on me … so I post on a forum about goat herding (using my email address as the registered address for the account). You now know that I’m into farming / herding goats & from that forum I link to another blog where I posted a comment about how much I hate my job. (I use this for illustration purposes only – I love my job )

Remember, the post on the goat herding forum was posted under a different username, it never mentioned my real name or anything to do with my occupation or location but you found it because I’d used the same email address … which I thought was kept private, but wasn’t.

From this forum post I link to a picture where you see my out in the fields with my goat and it has a picture of my car in the background. Simple, you now have my car make, model & numberplate.

You can now ring the DVLA and request all sorts of information on me because by now you know my:

• Name.
• Age.
• DOB.
• Hometown.
• Email.
• Parents / Siblings (could guess at my password / security question).

There are other ways to get further information such as social engineering but that’s for another day.

The point of this post wasn’t to scare you off the internet, but to make you aware of how much information someone can gather about you, for free, should they wish.

A rule of thumb I always use … every time you hit a key, someone, somewhere can see what you’ve written. Always assume that the information you share will be visible by everyone, forever.

Few have heard of the company NTP yet their patented technology is used in the fundamental operation of some of the most common technologies.

NTP have launched a lawsuit against Google, Apple, Microsoft, LG, HTC & Motorola for infringing on eight of their patents relating to the delivery of email to mobile devices (over wireless communication systems).

NTP have come under widespread criticism for aggressively enforcing it’s patents even though they don’t practice them.

I understand to a point how people can think it unfair that one individual or company can own the right to a capability … but surely that’s what patents were designed for? Therefore if you had thought of it first, you’d own the patent and you’d be just a little bit annoyed if someone was using it without your permission / without paying the license fee??

A great summer progressive house track here for the beautiful summer sunshine the UK is experiencing at the moment.

Larrakin – Breaking Love (Subgroover Remix)

Note: Links could not be found to the track. HiBias records website is currently down. If you are / represent the artist please feel free to leave relevant links in the comments & we will add them. We fully support the legal purchasing of music. Support the artists!

Just weeks after Apple release the new iPhone 4 we get a sneak peek of the iPhone 5!

iPhone 5

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone reported in April that Twitter were serving 600 million search queries per day. Twitter is now serving 800 million searches per day. An increase of 33%

Why?

The main reason is due to the increased acceptability & uptake of Twitter in all circles, not simply personal accounts.

Another reason being that Twitter is probably the quickest, easiest & best way to find out what’s happening (with your brand, product, service or competitors) right now.

So the question is, if you’re not utilising Twitter in your marketing strategy you certainly should be thinking about it!

Follow SEO Thunder on Twitter @seothndr – http://twitter.com/seothndr

This is probably the most simple explanation I’ve seen yet of how Google PPC bidding works & how increasing / improving certain factors within your ads to make them better for users will actually lower your overall PPC spend.

Essentially a higher quality, more targeted & more well written ad will attract a higher click through rate & therefore improve the ad rank quality score. The actual cost per click is determined by the quality score of the ad & the maximum cost per click … therefore a higher quality score means a lower cost per click and higher ad rankings. A win/win situation.

I came across this today & thought I’d share a simple way of removing the ‘Powered by GCalendar’ text link for the Joomla Gcalendar module.

The author doesn’t mind people removing the text link as he is distributing it as free software, but a small donation (or even a blog post about how great the Gcalendar Joomla module is) wouldn’t go amiss!

Ok, the instructions.

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Google Layout

In the file /components/com_gcalendar/views/google/tmpl/default.php

FIND

<?php
echo $params->get( ‘textafter’ );
echo “\n<div style=\”text-align:center;margin-top:10px\” id=\”gcalendar_powered\”><a href=\”http://g4j.laoneo.net\”>Powered by GCalendar</a></div>\n”;
?>

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GCalendar Layout

In the file /components/com_gcalendar/views/gcalendar/tmpl/default.php

FIND

echo $params->get( ‘textafter’ );
echo “<div style=\”text-align:center;margin-top:10px\” id=\”gcalendar_powered\”><a href=\”http://g4j.laoneo.net\”>Powered by GCalendar</a></div>\n”;

DELETE ALL.

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