Although I have a Facebook account, I’m afraid that I’m not a very active user at the moment. For the most part, I just use it as an example in the “Facebook, MySpace, and More” class we teach at the Senior Health Foundation. But like most other Web-related phenominia, I do try to keep up with what’s happening at Facebook, via the daily tech newsletters I subscribe to.
But today in class I got wind of a “Facebook Alert” that I had not heard of. One our students brought in a printout of a message that’s being posted in blogs by various Facebook users. Here’s what it says:
“ALERT: Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission. Click on “Settings” up at the top where you see the “Logout” link. Select “Privacy”. Then select “News Feed and Wall”. Next, select the tab that reads “Facebook Ads”. In the drop down box, select “No One”. Then save your changes. Do it now. Please pass this on!”
Two things left me a bit skeptical about the message.
First, none of my regular “main-stream” tech wires had said anything about this issue, and if it were true, I think it would be a big enough deal that I would have heard about it.
Second, the message ended with “Please pass this on!”. Whenever I see this at the end of a blog or especially at the end of an email message, my first thought is “this is nothing more than a hoax email chain letter”… you know, the ones that tell you about some “new catostrophic virus” or about “AOL giving away free computers” or some hoax like that. They ALWAYS tell you to pass the message on… just to propogate the hoax and use up our precious Net bandwidth.
In any case, as with any message I see that claims something I’m not sure about, I did some homework.
First, I Googled the first sentence of the alert. All I got back were links to various Facebook blogs that repeated the exact same message. No new information of any kind about the Alert. This made me begin thinking that this alert might actually be true.
Next, I decided to contact Facebook directly. As I began to look around the About Me and Help pages for contact information, I ran into the official Facebook Blog page, and I had an answer to my question. The very latest blog was about the alert. Here is a screen shot of the first part of the blog:
I’ll let you read the entire blog yourself, here… but the bottom-line is, it doesn’t sound like Facebook is really allowing third-part advertisers to use your uploaded photos without your permission. But the entire incident does bring us to a couple of important “teachable moments”.
(1) You can never be too concerned about your privacy. Whenever you get wind of a possible privacy breach that affects your computer use, you should take it seriously until you do your own homework and decide if the breach is for real or a myth.
(2) Before you pass rumored warning on to all your friends via email, or even your blog (or Facebook page, or whatever)… do your homework. Besides Googling the issue, you can also visit some of the popular “myth busting” sites, including Snopes, Hoax Slayer, and VMyths.
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