Amanda Todd, the 15-year-old Canadian girl found dead last week, was a victim -among other abuses and humiliations- of harmful and cruel tagging in the social network Facebook. She told the story herself in a heartbreaking video on YouTube five weeks ago detailing her battle with online harassment and bullies. Unable to bear the harassment, […]
Your photo associated to your name and profile in someone else’s photo album and available to all his friends… and you cannot decide beforehand whether they can tag you or not. This is something that could happen and it does happen everyday in social networks such as Facebook, as it does not request permission to […]
Have you ever thought about it? Even if your configuration on a social network seems that is set to protect your privacy, this feeling could be really misleading. This new video from the #NOTAGSwithoutpermission campaign shows with a clear and simple example what could happen. Any of your friends on the social network can […]
As it already happened during the month of July a trojan virus has been identified in a message circulating as it if were coming from Facebook. The message subject states that “Your friend added a new photo with you to the album”. This fake message is very similar to those that users usually receive from Facebook […]
Facial recognition is becoming a controversial feature in the United States, as it’s being applied not only in commercial and advertising environments, but also in security services. FBI is very interested in this kind of technology and aims “to collect as much biometric data as possible [. . .] and to make this information accessible to all […]
Mark Zuckerberg’s company is under investigation in Norway. Authorities in this country (the Norwegian Data Protection Authority) are analyzing Facebook’s facial recognition software as they see it as a threat to their citizen’s security. According to this organization, users could be tracked by this social network, which is a serious violation of privacy under Norwegian law. Bjørn […]
Facebook users tend to pay careful attention to those messages that come from this network, especially when users are notified of being tagged in a photo. Since tagging doesn’t require prior permission, it becomes paramount to review each and every tag in case users want to delete them. Malware writers take advantage of this situation, […]
A recent study of Brazialian social network users inquired about security and privacy reaching the following results: 45% of users have their Facebook profile set as private (only seen by friends), a lower figure comparing to that of USA (59%) 63% of them share photos on social networks 29% share videos 35%, personal data 14%, their geolocalization […]
In its eight years of existence, Facebook has included and removed many features with the alleged goal of facilitating communication and interaction among its users. Some of these tools, such as photo tagging, have caused (and still do) problems that so far have not been addressed properly. Facebook only intervenes when the content posted by […]
Tagging without permission in social networks not only affects our privacy, it can also be a weapon that others use to cyberbully us. As there is no need to require permission to show tags on photos, we don’t have any way to defend against its effects: we are exposed to abuses coming from anyone tagging […]
Facebook has just filed a fourth amendment to its S-1 to IPO that notes that it now has 500 million mobile users, 901 million monthly active users, and that it paid 23 million shares at $30.89 a share plus $300 million cash for Instagram for a total of $1,010,470,000. Facebook also made $1.058 billion in revenue in […]
New technologies have brought to our lives new tools and services, and with those, new customs and lifestyles. Every society requires a relatively long transition period to adapt to new social paradigms. Unfortunately, these periods have been reduced from millennia to centuries, from centuries to decades, and from decades to a few years. For the […]
