Posts Tagged ‘evolution’

I don’t usually do “reblogs” but the Matt McKeon blog post, “The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook“, is so striking and timely that I had to comment on it. The post is a visual chronicle of Facebook’s privacy changes since 2005. In 2005, content was only visible to limited circle of friends and their immediate network. Fast-forward to today and almost all of a Facebook user’s activity is available on the Web.

I think users are getting the short end of the stick on this deal and this type of privacy erosion will eventually lead to a mass exodus from Facebook. What? It’s already happening?

Publishers, on the other hand, are writing about the privacy issues but aren’t ready to put the kibosh on their Facebook strategies.

This privacy leakage ties into my post on the Geolocation Privacy Proposition. McKeon’s infographic doesn’t include “Location” but that could be just around the corner.

Click here to view the full McKeon blog post.

Spam on the popular microblogging site Twitter is starting to “evolve.”

We’ve all see Twitter spam accounts before – the account follows 2,000 people, maybe a couple of hundred followers (mostly from auto-follows), and only a single tweet with a link to who knows where.

I’ve seen a new spam approach over the past couple of weeks. This is a typical profile:

• The user is following 1,200 people or so
• Has 600-700+ followers
• Has 300-500 tweets
• Is replying to tons of different people

On the surface this looks fairly normal except the account has only been tweeting for a day or two and very few of the people they are replying to ever reply back. I’m guessing they don’t reply because they have no idea who it is.

On the couple of occasions that I did follow a person with that kind of profile, I was usually sorry after a few minutes. I’d receive a DM asking me to go to their site or a request to retweet some product information.

So the bottom line is, look a little deeper when you get a new follow request and avoid feeding into this next wave of spammers.