The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

Privacy? At GoogleMyFacePlusSpaceBook? Surely you jest!

I was inspecting Facebook's network traffic today in Firefox Devtools, when I realized that any text I put into the status update box was sent to Facebook's servers, even if I did not click the post button. Ever curious, I Googled this behaviour and came across a study which reveals some very frightening information:

Facebook calls these unposted thoughts "self-censorship," and insights into how it collects these nonposts can be found in a recent paper written by two Facebookers.

Via Lobsters, Facebook sending 'nonposts' to its servers and storing unpublished thoughts

I wouldn't be surprised if all the sites in the MyFaceGoogleBookPlusSpaceosphere aren't doing the same thing. And the thing is, when I do a search on “experimenting on unwilling subjects” the results all seem to be Na zis Nazis Nazis for some reason. Just approach FaceGoogleMyPlusSpaceBook that everything posted, whether “private” or not, is going to be seen by everybody. Because it is.

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