Matt McKeon turned the Electronic Freedom Foundation's chronology of eroding Facebook privacy settings into an interactive graphic showing how much of your FB data is visible, by default, to various categories of Internet users, by year. You can get a sense of the problem from these screenshots, but the details emerge best in McKeon's website. Still plotting my escape. Hat tip: Flowing data....

08 May, 2010

At a web app developers' conference on April 21, Facebook unveiled a breathtakingly ambitious program to reorganize the way personal information is shared on the Internet. The changes, known as Open Graph, are hard to summarize simply, but they include the use of cookies, login codes, and Facebook "like" buttons on other companies' websites, to automatically share user information and preferences with other websites, which then use that information to personalize a user's browsing experience. More detailed explanations here and here. With 415 million users, Facebook offers web developers a powerful incentive to play ball, and they have flocked to embrace the...

02 May, 2010