shadowspar

LinkedIn's Underhanded Privacy Fail

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 01:46:53 GMT

(Cross-posted from my "professional" DW.)

As you may or may not have already heard, LinkedIn recently added a new "feature" that allows them to use your name and image in their advertising. It is turned on by default, with no direct notification to the user that it has been added and activated.

This is an abuse of your trust. It is wrong.

You have authorized LinkedIn to do a certain set of things with your data, but they have gone and done something else with it; something to which you haven't consented. It is as though someone had asked to borrow your car to go grocery shopping but then took it bar-hopping instead.

It would be bad enough for any website to do this, but LinkedIn isn't just any social networking site -- it's a professional networking forum. Your presence on it is a living résumé. LinkedIn is the custodian of your professional reputation. Shouldn't they be handling it a little more respectfully than this?

What they should have done is to ask first, with the default being 'no'. Presumably, they knew that most people would either answer no if presented with this choice, or not answer at all -- thus removing the majority of their user base from this program and largely eliminating the additional ad revenue it would bring. This is a move that smacks of desperation; of a company that is ruthlessly trying to wring every possible cent of ad revenue out of its subscriber base.

I'm participating in one event that's using LinkedIn to organize, but after it's done, so is my LinkedIn account.

Thanks for coming out, LinkedIn.

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Give people credit for their good acts; hold them responsible for the bad

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:01:18 GMT

So Julian Assange has turned himself into the police and been arrested.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, said Assange's arrest is an attack on media freedom...

Uh, no it's not. It's an attempt to bring an individual to trial for criminal acts he's alleged to have committed -- rape and sexual assault, in this case. The charges predate Wikileaks' release of US diplomatic cables, FWIW.

I don't understand all the hand-wringing over this, like the media is trying to make out whether to drape Assange in a hero's cape or a villain's one. People do good things; those same people do bad things, and they should be praised for the former and held to account for the latter. The cells of Torquemada's prisons were apparently "large, airy, clean and with good windows admitting the sun....far superior to the civil prisons of that day", but you don't see anyone holding him up as a wholesome personage to emulate, and rightly so.

We can give Assange credit for his work with Wikileaks without letting him off the hook for his other behaviour. It's that simple.

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WTF Posterous

Tue, 25 May 2010 20:07:19 GMT

Just moved my "professional" blog here from Posterous.

I know I'm not Posterous' target audience, but it drove me nuts how their formatter mangled my text, littering <br>s all over the place, then mashing up all the line breaks. More than once, I've found out that their post editor is flat busted for me -- usually when the formatter has made a mess of something I've already posted, conveniently making it impossible for me to clean it up.

Even better: back in December, they decided to bring Viglink on board, a service which adds a Posterous affiliate code to links in your blog that don't have an affiliate code already. Of course, they didn't see fit to inform their users of this change; one of the Posterous founders replied on HackerNews, but they haven't mentioned it on their official blog or twitter stream.

I know the folks here at DW will never pull that kind of stupid shit. To boot, Dreamwidth has always been rock-solid for me in terms of reliability, which is funny when you think about how often the lights seem to go out on the services with dozens of full-time staff and sacks full of money. In short: thanks, denise and mark. =)

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