Currently reading thru this from bloomberg it’s mind numbing stuff and if true, is just disgusting. Humanity builds these incredible and amazing machines & then what do we do? What do we do@!!
We snitch on each other like disgruntled school children.
In a nut shell it’s not a good idea to give FB your phone number. I’ve never felt right about FB wanting my phone number and I’m darn glad I’ve honoured that feeling.
From the article…
“They found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks.”
Also there is some confusion about how private address book data is, and what FB does with that information.
Again from the article…
“People own their address books,” a Facebook spokesperson said by email. “We understand that in some cases this may mean that another person may not be able to control the contact information someone else uploads about them.”
In addition, the use of the phone number for advertising, is something that destroys peoples trusting of 2 stage authentication. After this sort of abuse of data by one of the biggest brands in the world who would want to trust any one else with this degree of security?
I also thought I’d mention this – a while back FB were trying to sucker people into giving them more data – email address info friend data… in return for more content… Don’t do it… FB wants you to rat on your friends. Also each user is worth up to about $158 to FB. So lets say you have 30 email address’s in your contacts, that’s $4,740.00 worth of data for more “Free” content – mainly generated by me and you.
So I moved home recently and what I didn’t realise, and what was also a very pleasant surprise, was that the new home has a fiber optic link (or fttp if you want the nice acronym!). So now via a not so great gigabit link via my ISP’s cheap and rather crappy supplied modem. It’s not rocket ship fast but should hopefully be a lot better than the old ADSL2 link that the poor thing limped along on. Fingers crossed that this should work faster and we should have longer uptimes!