Facebook Profile Hijacked: Beware the Dangerous OPEN Social Graph
Is Facebook a social graph safe haven? Facebook fans can’t seem to get their Mark Zuckerberg story straight.
Mr. Z. was feted as a “prince” of social networking just two months ago upon his “unveiling” of F8 to the world, and Facebook was almost universally heralded as an “anti-MySpace” answer to “completely closed nets.”
I noted otherwise, though. On May 25, I indicated: MySpace is 179 million times more open than Facebook because ”opening up” to become a third-party application platform does not actually open up a closed Web-based application, contrary to popular perception.
The Zukerberg vaunted “open platform” pitch belies the closed platform that is Facebook, I said upon his F8 show and tell in May.
I aslo postulated that the Facebook faithful would counter my Facebook is a closed platform argument by declaring that a “closed, open” Facebook is a good thing, echoing the Facebook company line that Facebook is all about “trusted connections,” as opposed to the anything goes wild wild MySpace West.
Popular Facebook perception has now had an irregular change of heart, changing its Facebook is open tune to a Facebook is closed song. Once again, however, the knee-jerk “conversation” refrain is an unnuanced rally, this time for Facebook to “open up,” what was nevertheless already deemed to have been an open platform.
The reality of the Facebook phenomenon, though, is that it is nothing that it promises, or seems to be. Facebook is NOT an open Web site, but it is not a protected social safe haven, either.
After all, can a “valid” Hotmail address really guarantee “trusted connections,” I posited in May.
NO, and it is now apparent that even a Harvard Facebook membership is no Facebook safe haven guarantee. Irony of Harvard ironies, given that Zuckerberg spent some time there, just enough to be “inspired” to launch a Zuckerberg “production” of college facebooks.
A now (in)famous Harvard student cum media Intern threw the Facebook notion of “trust” among Facebookers out a multi-billion dollar IPO window yesterday when she purported to “out” a fellow Harvard Facebooker by republishing her Facebook profile.
Flaunting Facebook’s own Terms of Service, a Facebook profile was hijacked in the name of media sensationalism; Lucy Morrow Caldwell took a screenshot of Caroline Giuliani’s private profile and posted it to the open Web for the world to see.
Facebook code was not manipulated, something worse was: The integrity of the Facebook social graph.
A Digg commenter wrtote yesteday: “I use Facebook instead of MySpace because it is not open-access to everybody. I like the fact that, in terms of data, only people who I want to see the information will see it.”
Really? Ms. Giuliani did not want, or intend, for the world to “see” her information.
Whatever it may be called, Facebook is NO social privacy nirvana. SEE: Facebook Embroiled in Washington DC Scandal: Howard Kurtz Dishes the Dirt
ALSO: Facebook Fans Trash Talk LinkedIn: Will Reid Hoffman Fight Back? and Mark Zuckerberg: Use Facebook at Your Own Risk!
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