Further evidence that Facebook does not 'get' privacy is brought to you this month by the BBC, which recently built a Facebook application that could mine personal data from anyone who played it, and their friends. (In a nice touch of irony, the application was called The Miner, as in 'data miner' get it?)A video clip from the BBC's Click programme can be seen here (you can find a text report here). It turns out that, by default, Facebook gives application developers wide-ranging access to anyone who installs the game, and their friends. Notice the theme here: "and their friends." In other words, you might be exercising due diligence over what you do with your Facebook account, but just one careless friend could undermine your privacy.
And you'll love the Facebook response: Using an application to abuse access would be a violation of the Facebook terms and conditions. Oh well then, no problem. That should take care of that. And here I was worried that someone would steal my credit card, but no worries, using someone else's credit card is a violation of Visa's terms and conditions. Those terms and conditions are probably what's limiting online credit card fraud losses to just a few billion dollars a year. And that's considerably less than what some analysts think Facebook is worth.
Over the past two months we have been subjected to some serious harassment by Dell Computer, from which we purchased, last year, the one and only Dell Computer we will ever own. Nice computer, terrible company, particularly the part known as Dell Financial, which is apparently based on the other side of the planet. Most of the calls are hang-ups, sometimes half-a-dozen within a three hour period. Many have blocked caller ID. Many of the callers have Indian or Pakistani accents but lack the courtesy I normally associate with people from those regions. Sometimes, after we manage to get a word in and request that the calls stop, we are assured that they will. But do they? Nooooo!
In yesterday's post I remarked on the need for CIOs and CSOs to raise the INFOrmation SECurity threat level. (Okay, I didn't actually say that, but that was the implication of what I did say.) Why? Because times are tight and that puts a fresh edge on computer crime, data leakage, and plain old data theft.
Protecting information, and the systems that process it, is part science, part art. There is no scientifically established correlation [that I know of] between economic conditions and security breaches, but commonsense tells us that the temptation to steal, cheat, defraud, or simply fudge a little, can be greater when times are tough. Witness the Lending Tree case. "Several former employees of LendingTree are believed to have taken company passwords and given them to a handful of lenders who then accessed LendingTree customer data files."
Oil crisis! Food crisis! Mortgage crisis! Healthcare crisis! Watch Nightly News these days and it's Nothing But Crisis. And what are our elected officials in Washington doing about it? A whole lot of nothing. A lot of talk, precious few results. Today, the American people are struggling with tough decisions, like whether to spend their shrinking earnings on the mortgage or health insurance or food. Meanwhile Congress is hunkered down under a nice dry roof, on full stomachs, with full medical and dental, and apparently unable to make tough decisions. Instead it's going for the easy options, the low-hanging legislative fruit as it were, like declaring 
