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Re: Don't give too much away...

Posted: Fri May 03, 2019 10:19 pm
by badpenny
True …… however, it is also astonishing how many details like that are already known to them ….. apparently.

BP :-(

Re: Don't give too much away...

Posted: Sun May 05, 2019 2:04 pm
by pennymachines
I split and retitled the above posts because they seem worthy of a separate topic.

I think TreeFrog raised important points about online privacy and security.
Facebook probably offers the easiest means of giving it all away. It collects data on you even if you don’t have an account, including your browser history. Also your Facebook-using family, friends and acquaintances may post photos which include you, and get tagged with your name, and Facebook gleans your phone number, email address etc. from their shared contact books.

A leaked 2004 instant messenger conversation Mark Zuckerberg had with a friend a few weeks after launching Facebook at Harvard University demonstrated a cavalier attitude to others' privacy:
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don’t know why

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb fucks

In light of that, it's unsurprising to see him in trouble for doing the same on a larger scale and for greater profit in 2018.

And when not doing it deliberately: Facebook says big breach exposed 50 million accounts to full takeover.

This year it was revealed that since as far back as 2012 over 20,000 Facebook employees had access to 600 million user passwords, because they were stored in plain text.

From 2016 to three months ago (when it was reported) Facebook enticed users to install an app which secretly recorded their phone calls.

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, takes his own security seriously, spending $10 million a year on it and employing an army of secret police to guard his secretly negotiated Lake Tahoe compound. He clearly believes he has something to hide: his staff are not allowed to take photos of him and he tapes over his laptop's microphone and camera.

Facebook rant over.

To TF's other point about photos revealing where you live...
That is something we should all be aware of.
Obviously, photos will only include this if taken on a device with GPS. My camera doesn't have it, but if you use a device which does, your coordinates won't be recorded unless you have GPS tracking turned on. Currently, because of battery limitations and data allowances, most users don't leave it on. So in practice, most photos don't show location (at present).

You can disable the location setting on your device and you can easily view and delete your photos' EXIF data.

It's perhaps also worth being aware that the EXIF includes your device make, model and settings.

I optimize most of the images here for online display, and in the process remove the original EXIF data. I'm currently looking into ways of automatically stripping it out.* To be fair, I believe Facebook already do this (no idea if they record it first though).

* Now implemented