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On Fame

By on May 31, 2011 in Privacy

In his new autobiography Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe explains fame from the famous person’s point of view. It’s something I’d never considered before, and yet it makes blinding sense. In this case, the reference is to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Lowe once praised the film to Coppola, who replied

You know, Rob, to me The Godfather is like that lamp, he says, pointing. It exists. It’s right there. People have opinions about it. The real Godfather, for me, is the experience I had making it.

It took Lowe years, he says, to fully comprehend the remark. Here’s his explanation:

“If you are fortunate enough to be part of a hit, particularly a transcendent one, all emotional ownership [of it] is transferred from you to the audience. They judge it and embrace it; project their own hopes, dreams and fears onto it; take their personal meaning from its themes, and with these investments it becomes theirs. The significance of your participation pales in comparison to the significance the project has on their imaginations. And so, you are left outside of the phenomenon. Just as Paul McCartney can never experience The Beatles, Francis Ford Coppola can never experience The Godfather. It becomes a lamp.”

The book, by the way, has loads of dishy tales about Lowe’s family, friends and films. It’s a quick, entertaining and occasionally illuminating read.

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No, Facebook Doesn’t ‘Own’ Your Private Photos

By on April 27, 2011 in Life Online, Privacy

Another panicky status meme is making the Facebook rounds. And while there’s a grain of truth buried in it – as there is with many memes – it’s surrounded by some scare-mongering misinformation.

The current status meme reads something like this:

ATTENTION: This Friday, Facebook will become owner of the publishing rights of ALL your private photos. You need to make a simple change: go to ‘account’, ‘account settings’, ‘facebook adverts’(along the top), ‘ads shown by third parties’, choose ‘NO ONE’ then SAVE. Takes seconds to fix. And please share share share. (for those who haven’t done this yet..)

That right there is two completely separate issues rolled into one. Let’s take them one at a time.

First: Facebook doesn’t “own” your private photos. In fact, section 2 of their Terms (have you ever read them? you might want to) explicitly states “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook” (emphasis mine). They further state on their Facebook Ads Settings page, “Despite what you may have heard, Facebook does not give your personal information to advertisers—including your name, profile picture or any of your photos.”

According to those same terms, when you upload your photos or other intellectual property, y ou give Facebook a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post… this license ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

Why the non-exclusive license? So that they have the right to a) have your content on their servers and b) serve it to others, in accordance with your privacy preferences.

That brings us to part 2. Yes, Facebook is now (and has been) integrating their content into third party websites, and doing something they call “social advertising” on Facebook itself. That’s when they show you, in your sidebar, that such-and-such friend of yours “Liked” a given page or product, for example.  If that sort of thing wigs you out – as it does me – you can visit the Facebook Ads settings page, click on both Edit Third Party Ad Settings and Edit Social Ads settings and make sure you select “No One” for each of them.

My long-held opinion and personal preference is that the default sharing settings should always be the most private. Users should have to affirmatively opt-in to more public levels of sharing of their data and IP. However, since Facebook is provided free to users, it needs to make money in other ways, such as through advertising. They sell ads by mining our data, and our content (if we let them). So be it. We’re always free to choose not to use it, after all.

And while I’m no Facebook apologist, repeating erroneous information like “Facebook will own all your photos on Friday!” obscures the real message, which is: It’s a good idea, and your responsibility, to regularly review all of your Facebook privacy settings and make sure they’re how you want them to be.

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A Spam-Free Inbox

By on April 4, 2011 in Privacy

This isn’t a commercial or paid endorsement, but it’s going to read like one. Rest assured I’m merely a happy long-term customer. :)

Worried about your email address being exposed to spammers after last weekend’s Epsilon breach? Fed up with the spam you already get? Read on.

I intentionally use separate email addresses for various purposes (one for newsletter subscriptions, one for online shopping, etc.). But I’ve used the same primary email address since 1999. No surprise, then, that at one point I was getting 600+ spam emails every day.

That was (barely) manageable on my desktop mail client with the junk filter activated, but once I got a smartphone in 2004, game over. (Ever try deleting 600 emails on a Treo, making sure NOT to delete the ones you want to read or save? Ouch.)

Drowning in email, I turned to a web-based service called SpamArrest. After configuring it and leaving it to churn through my inbox overnight – I usually leave email on the server for 10 days after reading – the result was BLISS. Virtually no spam.

SpamArrest operates based on a whitelist. Upload your address book and everyone in it is considered pre-approved. Get email from newsletters, schools or online stores? You can pre-approve entire domains. Send an email, and the recipients are automatically added to your whitelist. Anyone NOT approved is given a Captcha challenge (you can customize the accompanying text) to prove that they’re human and not a bot. You can also permanently block given emails or domains.

Known spam is stopped before it ever gets to you. If SpamArrest isn’t sure whether a given email is spam or not, it pops it into an “Unverified” folder and keeps it for a week for you to examine at your leisure. By default it will consider anything coming from your own email address to be unverified (since many spammers spoof their recipients’ emails as the senders’), unless you direct it otherwise.

You can even read and send email from the SpamArrest website if you wish (helpful when you’re away from your own computer/device).

SpamArrest isn’t free – prices start at $3.75/month – but more than pays for itself, IMO, in savings of time and aggravation. It does, however, offer a 30-day free trial if you want to try before you buy. (Disclosure: that’s an affiliate link, and I’ll get a credit if you end up subscribing. If you’d prefer to navigate directly to www.spamarrest.com without using my link, the same free trial awaits you.)

Even if you use SpamArrest or a similar provider, email may make its way into your inbox because it appears to be from a company (Chase, CitiBank, Target, TiVo) with which you’ve done business. Keep in mind:

  • These companies will never ask you to provide or “reconfirm” sensitive information via email. Don’t fall for it.
  • If you want to make sure that you’re providing your information to the right website, type in the URL yourself (as opposed to clicking on it in an email) and make sure you’re on a secure (https) page.
  • One way to check the links in an email is to hover over them. If the URL displayed is different than what’s represented in the text, do not click.

When in doubt, contact the company yourself by telephone or email.

Be careful out there!

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Interesting Links of the Day

By on March 29, 2011 in Links 'O The Day, Privacy, twitter

Herewith my links of interest for March 29, 2011:

  • Mashable gathers ten of the most extraordinary Tweets ever, from the very first one (by co-founder Jack Dorsey) to a marriage proposal to the infamous 2008 single-word tweet “Arrested” that arguably first brought Twitter to the mainstream media’s attention.
  • Many people choose to follow a vegetarian/vegan diet for political reasons (animal cruelty, big-business farming). But the best reason might be the one uncovered by the The China Study. This multi-year research undertaken by Oxford and Cornell found, quite simply, that people who eat a plant food diet and avoid animal proteins and fats will minimize and/or reverse the development of chronic diseases. Sound good to you?
  • This Skittles commercial is either really clever or really bizarre. Maybe both, actually.
  • Del Harvey, the leader of Twitter’s trust and safety team posted a brilliant, succinct piece on the importance of using strong passwords, and using different passwords for different sites. Too much trouble? Probably not as much trouble as getting your online banking or email hacked. And those Facebook memes that have you put your birthplace as your status? That’s a no.
  • The most interesting thing to come out of SXSWi, as far as I’m concerned: Hashable’s info-packed infographic on the who, what, when and where of people connecting during the show.
  • Enrique Iglesias is going on tour with Britney Spears this summer. Oh wait, no he’s not.

 

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MobileMe Upgrade / iCal Issues

By on March 10, 2011 in Life Online, Privacy

If you don’t use (and don’t plan to use) MobileMe to sync your calendars, move along. Nothing to see here. If you use a me.com address as your primary email, you can also move along.

If, however, like me you don’t use a me.com address as your primary email, know this before upgrading to the new MobileMe calendar (which you’ll need to do by May 5 if you want to keep syncing calendars between devices):

  • You won’t be able to use iCal to edit events you created in iCal prior to the upgrade. You’ll only be able to edit them on the MobileMe site.
    • You WILL be able to edit events you create in iCal after the upgrade. Just not the ones you’d made previous to the upgrade.
  • Invitations for events you create in iCal after you upgrade will come from your me.com address. There is no option, currently, to have them come from an external (i.e. non me.com) address. So if you send meeting invites, the invitations will come from, and the responses will go to, your me.com address.

Here are my specific issues with the above:

  1. No forewarning from Apple that this might be an issue during the upgrade. It took 90 minutes on the phone , including escalation to a senior MobileMe advisor, to figure out why I was unable to edit events in iCal after the upgrade.
  2. No ability to give edit rights on a shared calendar to a non-MobileMe address (which would, in theory, resolve the edit issue above). Calendars can be shared with non-MobileMe addresses, but only on a read-only basis.
  3. No option to have calendar invites come from a non-MobileMe address going forward. This is not ideal for those of us who want work-related meeting invitations to come from our work email addresses, or who prefer to keep our me.com addresses private.

These things aren’t the end of the world, but they are irritating, particularly for a service for which Apple charges $100 per annum. If they irritate you as much as they irritate me, please join me in making your feelings known to Apple. If enough people have these issues, perhaps they’ll be persuaded to make some changes going forward.

Have you encountered these or other issues with the MobileMe upgrade? Let me know in the comments.

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