‘Frictionless Sharing’ Raises Hackles

Frictionless Fears: In its never-ending quest to make sharing yourself online even easier, Facebook has introduced a new, creepy feature: frictionless sharing. Frictionless sharing lets users seamlessly and instantly share their activity on certain apps and websites on Facebook. For example, if you are listening to something on Spotify or reading an article on a news site, it will show up on Facebook. It’s basically sharing without having to click a “like” button. But what does this really mean for users, besides being hyper-synched with Facebook? Well, it seems to be a pretty big privacy breach, and people aren’t happy about it. Facebook never seems to have given up on the promise of Beacon, its first ill-fated attempt at forcing oversharing on its users. Frictionless sharing means Facebook cookies remain open and can track your browsing habits and acquire personal data. As David Winer wrote in a blog post on this new Facebook sharing model,“[T]hey’re doing something that I think is really scary, and virus-like. The kind of behavior deserves a bad name, like phishing, or spam, or cyber-stalking.” Nik Cubrilovic, an entrepreneur and hacker, elaborated on Winer’s post on his own blog, explaining that even if you logout of Facebook, the cookies can still track you. Once again, Facebook gets creepy. HuffPo

Unwanted Internet Fame: When Angie Varona was 14 years old she took provocative pictures of herself in lingerie and in bikinis and put them on her private Photobucket account. Someone hacked her account and leaked her private photos on the Web. Against her will, Angie became a “jailbait” Internet hit. It’s sad and sick, but it’s no surprise, which is probably the saddest part. Pulling provocative pictures of young girls from social networking sites has become a more and more common creepy practice, a new source of underage erotica. Angie and her father contacted the FBI to help get the pictures off of the Web, but there are still Angie Varona fan pages and blogs with her photos and 499,000 Google search results for her name. Gawker