Facebook Welcomes You to NAMBLA

Even if you're not on Facebook (and who isn't on Facebook?), you've probably heard about Facebook's new groups feature. The interesting feature about this feature is that anyone can add you to a group without your permission. There is no approval requirement.

So what can happen? You could be added to any group, as happened to Jason Calacanis, who became part of the NAMBLA* group on Facebook without his approval.  Here is the text of the email that Calacanis sent to Facebook when he found out about that

Someone...added me to the "NAMBLA" group on Facebook. I know I'm not a member of NAMBLA.

I've now been assigned to a group that advocates... well.... ummm.... you can look it up--it's very bad. Also troubling:

1. I was never asked to join the NAMBLA group 2. I was never informed that I was "force-joined" to the NABLA group.

Facebook's CEO responded to this issue by saying that it's easy for people to leave groups.  It appears that the actual Facebook is even more interesting to watch than the movie about Facebook.

Thanks to The Consumerist for spotting this.

*NAMBLA is North American Man/Boy Love Association

New Facebook Privacy Issue and It's a Doozy

Until recently you could only really mess up your own life if you didn't pay attention to Facebook's privacy settings. Now Facebook gives its users the ability to destroy all of your friends' and family's and acquaintances' privacy.

The new Facebook iPhone app gives users the option to upload their entire contact database to Facebook, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and photos. So, without your permission or knowledge, somebody --even just a casual acquaintance-- can send that information to Facebook, reports The Guardian.

Facebook warns iPhone users about this before the app syncs your contacts with Facebook's servers, but we all know how many people pay attention to privacy warnings. Who's going to track down everyone in their address book and ask, "Is it okay to upload your contact information to Facebook?" Nobody is:  People are just going to click "I Agree" and be done with it.

Tech Column: Kinko's Keeps a Copy of Everything You Copy

by Bill Adler

I like writing about technology problems that have solutions, and when it comes to privacy and technology, there are steps you can take to help ensure that your personal information remains with you and you alone. You can set your web browser to reject cookies so that web sites have a harder time storing information about you. You can use advanced privacy plug-ins for your browser such as Better Privacy for Firefox, which blocks normally unblockable cookies, and PasswordFail for Chrome, which tells you if a website stores passwords in plain text, rather than encrypted, as they should.You can even block flash cookies, which are notorious for tracking Internet users from website to website.