Secure Connections to Facebook

For the past 2 days I was plagued with constant blank pages whenever trying to visit Facebook. I tried adding an "s" to http://facebook.com and viola! It opened!

I was surprised because I did try that a few months back and it didn't work, which made me think: Why isn't Facebook advertising the fact that it supports SSL?! I certainly wouldn't want my corporate admins to be snooping on my status updates or picture uploads/views!

But since this is Facebook, there's yet another disappointment: They use full URLs rather than relative ones. This means that when you click a link to comment or a profile, you'll be sent using HTTP and not HTTPS (no security/encryption). That's retarded.

Thankfully, there's an addon for FireFox called Force-TLS which forces the use of HTTPS even when the link you're being redirected to is HTTP.

Facebook Desperate For Love

After so many Facebook privacy breaches by Facebook itself, and the recent statement of its founder on how privacy is not important and everything should be publicly available, seems like Facebook is trying hard to get some back respect and love...

If privacy isn't that important, then why is its founder's profile private? The same person calling for public exposure of info... hmmm???

Note: Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) has 2 profiles: A public one (for stunts) and a private one (which got breached when they broke their own privacy rules!).

Try harder you snob.

Facebook Privacy: Friend Lists Are Public

After Facebook's new fiasco about its new "enhanced" and "simple" privacy settings, which resulted in setting most, if not all, pictures and information to be public!

What I found today is that even if you set your friend list to be private, it's still available to the public eyes, through a swift link.

To demonstrate, I'll show an example on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder.

Here's Mark's profile. As you can see, there's no friend list available to the public. but that's OK, going to this link will show the friend list! Tada!

In case they fix this problem before you can look at it, here're pictures:




The trick applies even to numeric IDs of users.

Facebook Privacy: Where Is It?

I'm new to Facebook. I didn't like it before and I still don't like it. One of the reasons that I dislike it is its weird, absurd and abusive privacy laws.

I have no apps or games lurking in my profile. I'm part of 2 groups so far. The other day I wanted to join a fan-page, and I was shocked at the message that showed up:


I simply clicked a poll asking which Operating System I use. It asked me the following:
"Allowing Poll access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work.
Allow or cancel"

I find it very hard to understand why a poll application needs to pull my profile along my friends'! It's a stinky poll! All it could require is my name and whatever public information I've opted to share.

The fact that Facebook defaults to leaving every privacy option set to Public isn't enough deter people apparently.

I should note that even when you leave the fan-page, game or application, your information is still retained by the maintainers of that application. It is not deleted!

I haven't joined any games, and will not, because of such absurd privacy violations. Maybe if people paid enough attention, Facebook would actually do something about it. Hopefully. One day. Eventually?