Today's Most popular News

Source:Valleywag

“My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile,” says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone’s profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you’ve been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama’s intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it’s considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

Facebook has a history of protecting profiles from outsiders. The site once sent cease-and-desist letters to two of Valleywag’s sister blogs for publishing certain student profiles.

The site does not allow regular users to see which profiles other users have seen. While one third-party application lets users voluntarily make their profile-visiting known, no application allows one to “spy” on the activity of an unknowing user.

Checking who’s viewed a profile may be how Facebook found the tipster who violated their terms of service by sending Valleywag Steve Ballmer’s profile. But were they violating their own terms?

Well, Facebook’s privacy policy doesn’t explicitly reserve or waive employees’ right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery — it’s one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program, and even AOL apologized for releasing semi-anonymous search data and violating its privacy policy.

We have no idea what else employees can see. Do they look at your messages? Your private gifts? Who knows? (Really, who knows? Email me or the tipline. Unlike some, we’ll protect your identity.)

Source:Valleywag

Event-planning site Going.com created Naughty Gifts for the Facebook platform last summer, hoping the app would bring traffic to the site. But instead, a lot of users have come and gone. The company says Naughty Gifts has gathered 4 million Facebook users, predictably including my boss. [Ed.’s note: Come see me in my office, Carlson.] Going.com, however, hasn’t seen a commensurate benefit from all that attention, with less than 250,000 monthly visitors according to Compete.com. So what’s a startup to do?

Throw a boozefest for hormone-wracked college students and give away actual naughty gifts, of course.

“We want our users back,” a company flack told me last night at Webster Hall, just off Union Square, where the dirty went down. Did it work? Too early to tell, but I can attest: the goody bag was all sorts of bad. In the good way.

• One t-shirt featuring an image of an escalator and the words Going and down. Witty.
• One Good Vibrations pearl drop vibrator and requisite AA battery.
• One Good Lubrications personal lubricant, net volume 0.1 fluid ounces — so it’s safe to take through airport security!
• One classic Good Vibrations condom.
• And finally, one pair of panties which read, “Coming … and Going.” Also witty.

Just one question: What will advertisers like Southwest Airlines think of a naughty stunt like this? Will it help Going.com land more ad dollars — or send them, greased with lube, right off the runway?

Source:Valleywag

What do a bunch of networking geeks do when they gather for a five-day conference in Amsterdam? Nothing like the debauched dealmaking drinkfest wrapping up in Hawaii. But attendees at the Ripe 55 meeting, covering a very different kind of networking, will probably do much more to improve the world’s Internet connections. And they enjoyed a much more memorable sendoff, with this “American Pie” parody, “The Day the Routers Died.” I don’t understand half of it, but it’s still hilarious.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Conferences, Geeks Gone Wild, Clips, Ripe 55. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.