I'd do this, if only I were eligible.

[p_zeitgeist]

ETA: And to prove just how distracted by the RL stuff I've been, I see on rereading that I forgot the bit of news that triggered this entire post. Namely, that Facebook has apparently silently reintroduced an extraordinarily intrusive tracking cookie that it had pulled following an enormous outcry from the user base. The sort of thing that tracks

Comments

[vschanoes]

May I be smug about never having had a facebook account now, precisely because I'd heard that it was impossible to ever delete your info, and it creeped me out? Please? I so rarely get the chance to revel in my essential curmudgeonliness.

[p_zeitgeist]

We can be smug together, then. I have similarly steered clear of the site because everything I knew about its attitude toward privacy creeped me out, and I treasure my few comrades in curmudgeonhood. We few, we happy few, we band of untracked surfers . . .

[abject_reptile]

FB's record of my teddy bear's surfing habits must be quite interesting. :)

[p_zeitgeist]

All 800+ pages of it, yeah.

Of course that's the counterargument: some of the tracking will only mess up whatever kinds of statistical analysis they're trying to do with all that information. If they must track, your teddy bear is just the sort of target I want them tracking.

[acari]

One of the people who originally did this was German. The interesting thing was what he did not get from FB. Stuff like info of picture where he blocked being marked was retained as being "company secrets".

Also, I love how Gawker calls our privacy laws "arcane". Everyone here (Germany) knows we have the right to demand a company hand over the info they have gathered of us.

[acari]

The guy is Austrian not German. Here is a German article that explains what he did and the info he got and what FB kept hidden.

[seaskystone]

I suspect the "arcane" comment was meant ironically, intended to mock the US laws, which apparently do not supply this basic right.

[p_zeitgeist]

I suspect you're right. And no, we don't have anything like it in place -- which, considering the degree of dysfunction in the basic system these days, is a lot less surprising than I wish it were.

[dancing_crow]

Go Elizabeth Warren!!! (re local politics)

[p_zeitgeist]

Amen to that. I only wish we'd had her in the mix last time around.

[lady_ganesh]

The one drawback of my current job: Facebook won't let you administer a corporate account without a personal account of your own. So I have one. I need to find some US ways to annoy Facebook.