For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.
This page contains notes that have been moved off of the main Facebook page due to age, relevance, or repetitiveness.
Facebook has mysteriously closed several pages of anti-budget-cut activists in the UK.
Facebook blocked links to the humor site lamebook which Facebook is trying to crush.
This shows how it is a bad thing that so many people use Facebook pages instead of setting up their own sites using many different providers.
Don't depend on Facebook to store any data that you might miss if Facebook takes it away from you.
It got Facebook to accept the video by putting in squares for the breasts.
The real problem here is not that Facebook draws the line at the wrong place (though it does). It is that Facebook has so much influence that organizations such cancer charities feel obliged to publish through Facebook.
How Facebook leads people to forget all the different sorts of people they are giving their information to.
This is not to mention Facebook itself, a perpetual lurker whose presence is dangerous to overlook.
Anyone can get a Facebook user's personal information by buying ads on Facebook.
Facebook cooperates with store purchaser identification cards to track users' purchases.
You can confuse them using someone else's discount card or number.
Facebook has started working with a purchase-tracking company to cross-reference Facebook's data about users with data about their purchases.
This can't affect you if you do as I do: refuse to use Facebook, block its surveillance of non-users (done via Like buttons), and pay cash. But it is nasty nonetheless.
Facebook in Europe may be required to discard some user data after a time, without sending it to the US.
This may reduce the harm that Facebook does, but is not even close to enough to make it ethically acceptable. Most of the criticisms reported in this site remain valid.
How Facebook Teams Up With Data Brokers.
Facebook's graph search puts many users in danger.
Keep in mind that Facebook has access to this information regardless of privacy settings, and (thanks to the PAT RIOT Act) Big Brother has access to all of it too.
Facebook "apps" that some persons run get access to everything their "friends" make visible to them, and may hand all that info to a company.
While this article shows that there is currently a way to turn that off, I expect that Facebook will take any necessary steps to ensure that most users don't do so. The purpose of those apps is to get access to that data, and I'm pretty sure that benefit figures, to Facebook's advantage, into the financial arrangements between the app developer and Facebook. Facebook will make sure it does not lose that advantage.
Facebook messaging further threatens user privacy.
Don't use Facebook. Facebook permanently records everything you do, even what you look at, even items that are "deleted". And presumably gives them to the CIA. A timeline shows how Facebook has increasingly shown contempt for privacy.
EFF says that "the answer" is to complain to Facebook. I suggest another answer: don't put your personal information in Facebook. If you use Facebook at all, just tell people how to contact you in other ways.
The Senate weakened video rental privacy law to cater to Facebook and Netflix.
Facebook's new search interface enables users to poke at other users' data in new ways. The ethical import is that it shows how Facebook itself, and the US government (which can get Facebook's entire collection of personal data without a court order), have always been able to poke around in it.
Facebook uses several tricks to distract people from recognizing how much access to their personal data they are giving to apps.
"Logging out" of Facebook does little to stop its surveillance.
In particular, every page with a "like" button still knows who you are.
Facebook made changes in response to this article, to delete one cookie that identified the users. It seems there are two other cookies which also identify the user, but Facebook says users should not object to them because they are made for benign purposes.
If that is true, so what? They still track you, unless you stop using Facebook, and delete all its cookies for good and all.
But Facebook can track you through your IP address too, if you don't use TOR to disguise that. To avoid being tracked by Facebook "like" buttons, you need to block your browser from showing them or accessing the Facebook page that generates them. This is necessary if you ever used Facebook from that IP address, even if you stop using Facebook, and delete all its cookies for good and all.
Facebook snoops on surfers via disqus comments: when a page uses disqus for comments, the proprietary disqus software loads a Facebook software package into the browser of every anonymous visitor to the page, and makes the page's URL available to Facebook.
More on how much Facebook tracks users.
The US Federal Trade Commission ruled that Facebook's violation of its stated privacy policies was illegal.
It is proper to make Facebook keep its promises, but this does not go far enough to make Facebook acceptable to use. It does not limit Facebook's data collection — for instance, it doesn't stop Facebook from collecting of data about browsing through "Like" buttons. It only limits what Facebook can do with that data, and certainly does not stop Facebook from handing it over to Big Brother under the U SAP AT RIOT act.
Facebook is sneakily leading users to send email to other users via Facebook.
Using Facebook graph search makes it a lot easier to find details of someone's life in order to attack him.
Zuckerberg's sister is upset that a friend got a photo she had posted on Facebook and posted it elsewhere publicly.
As the article points out, abuse of what people post is the heart and soul of Facebook.
Instagram, now under Facebook control, demands use of people's photos for sale and advertising.
Instagram later tried to reassure users that this didn't mean it would "own" their photos.
That is a red herring — the issue is that photos in Instagram will be used in advertisements whether the user likes it or not.
User rejection pressured Instagram to reverse this change, but it will surely try something else nasty.
Facebook graph search is an ideal tool for sophisticated, targeted phishing.
Now Facebook tells your "friends" everything that you do using a large collection of other network services.
This will at least give people an idea of how much information those services tell Big Brother about all their users.
Copyright (c) 2013 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.