Uptown Magazine - December 17/09
Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?
If you have logged onto Facebook in the past week, you will have noticed that the No. 1 social-networking site has revamped its privacy settings. Despite the Book’s claim it was turning over more control to users, the changes are potentially opening up even more personal content than ever before. Few people have taken the time to see how these changes impact the type of information they share with the world. “In this case, if you simply click through the windows, you’ve exposed all of your private Facebook information, including comments, friends, pictures and status updates, to ‘everyone,’” writes tech-guru Jason Calacanis in a recent article that was posted through his Twitter account. “In other words, clicking through changes everything in Facebook terms - unlike every other license or update screen you’ve experienced in your life.” In an effort to go head-to-head with social-networking rival Twitter, Facebook is opening up even more profile information to be crawled for search results that will hopefully generate more page views for Facebook. While it’s obvious to everyone who signs up for Twitter that your information will be made public (that’s the point of the site), with Facebook most people sign up thinking/believing their information will stay private. This bait-and-switch technique isn’t going to sit well with most users once they realize what has happened. “Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal gain: page views,” claims Calacanis. “Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines - including Facebook’s - in order to drive more traffic to Facebook.” While it’s too early to see what impact these changes will have, you can bet protest groups will pop up and a bunch of users will claim they are deleting their profile (only to reappear in a few months).
Homemade Versions of Things We Love
The recession may not have hit Winnipeg as hard as other cities in North America, but we’ve always been known as bargain hunters. If you aren’t afraid of some basic DIY projects, Lifehacker has a list of the Top 10 Homemade Versions of Things We Love, from a wire-and-wood DTV antenna to pick up free HD signals to a homemade version of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Quick Hits
MP3 of the Week: The XX - Crystalised (Grandtheft Remix)
Team Canada’s Grandtheft continues his stellar run of must-have releases with a dancefloor-ready reworking of the The XX’s Crystalised.
Video of the Week: For the Whole World to See trailer
In 1975, three brothers from Detroit recorded an album for Columbia Records that was never released, but will eventually go on to rewrite the history books. For the Whole World to See is an upcoming documentary about Detroit protopunk band Death and its genre-defining album, finally released this year by Drag City.
