More Reasons Why To Quit Facebook and LinkedIn

Man, I am looking smarter and smarter every day for quitting Facebook and LinkedIn. Can you imagine that your credit rating will suffer for something that you have posted on LinkedIn or Facebook?

Here is the URL of an article of Privacy Violation on these social networking sites:

http://www.smeweb.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3722:facebook-inc-data&catid=62:news&Itemid=101

And here is a reprint of the article in case it goes off line:

Credit agency plans to use Facebook Inc data to form credit ratings

Monday, 11 June 2012 11:25

Schufa is also looking into using information from other sources including Twitter and Linkedin.

Schufa, Germany's largest credit agency, is planning to use data from Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) to form credit ratings, according to leaked documents says to consumer advisory body Which?

As well as pulling information from Facebook pages the agency is looking into using information from other sources including Twitter, Linkedin and Google Street View to assess individual credit ratings.

The documents, leaked to German broadcaster NDR, suggest the agency is planning to use 'crawling techniques' like those used by search engines to find relevant information with aim of 'identifying and assessing the prospects and threats'.

Mark Batistich, a member of the Which? Legal team, said: "Whilst it's not exactly clear what credit checking companies such as Schufa intend to do with data obtained from Facebook, it is certainly possible, at least in the UK, that using such information without consent could be in breach of the Data Protection Act, and also the Facebook Terms and Conditions, which set quite stringent guidelines on what can be done with information obtained from that site."

The plans have drawn criticism from the German consumer protection minister Ilse Aigner as well as justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who both said the plans went too far.

Check to see if Your LinkedIn Password Was Hacked

LastPass has created a secure tool to see if your LinkedIn password was compromised. I quit LinkedIn in late March, or early April, and still my password on my dead account was compromised.

Click HERE to go to the LastPass site to check to see if your LinkedIn password was compromised.

Make Money from LinkedIn Passwords Hacked

A few weeks ago, I mentioned on this blog that I have quit both Facebook and LinkedIn. That looks like a pretty prescient and smart move now, in spite of the fact that prophets are never accepted in their home country.

Based on the news today that 6 million LinkedIn passwords were published on a hacker blog in Russia, I feel that by quitting these two Internet time-wasters, I have greatly enhanced my security from identity theft.

You can read about the password breaches with LinkedIn here.

A few thoughts come up from this episode. In no obvious order:

• A lot of people use the same password for their email, bank accounts, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. A breach of one, may be a catastrophic breach for some people.
• The other striking fact was that may users used linkedin as their password to LinkedIn. This sort of thing enabled the Russian hackers with small penises to break the SHA-1.
• LinkedIn was negligent in not "salting" the passwords with random bits to enhance the security so that the same passwords do not hash out the same every time.
• This is a prime opportunity for some young hotshot lawyer to sue the pants off LinkedIn in a class action suit for not protecting its users privacy.
• We trust these websites a lot with our identities, and when they fail to protect them, they should be made to pay for that negligent lapse. After all, they make money from the users who sign up. You would think that they would protect that revenue stream.
• A class action suit would work, because LinkedIn has some pretty heavy corporate hitters who value their identity privacy.
• This sort of thing spells opportunity for any geek who can solve the intrinsic problems of traditional user name and password credentials for websites.

And I can't go a day without mentioning my own personal bête noire -- Facebook. I am not sure if Facebook tightened things up with a complete https session, but various industry insiders pointed out that there are vulnerabilities in Facebook. If Anonymous or the diminuitive tallywhacker hacker Russians ever break Facebook security, it would greatly accelerate its inevitable destiny of becoming a penny stock.

I Quit Cold Turkey ~ Facebook and LinkedIn

I got rid of my addiction. My Facebook addiction. I have been status-free for two weeks. I have quit my stalker fits. I stopped my furtive network-building on LinkedIn with people I barely know.

Actually it is easy to be smug and liken Facebook to smoking, but there is a deeper reason, and that is privacy. I am a citoyen du monde -- a citizen of the world. I write software for high net worth individuals in Caribbean tax havens. I have written money transfer and micro-payments software for a small developing country. I am currently writing software to fight epidemics in Africa. I have written software for a European Union concern, and I have been requested to do a threat and risk assessment for a UN agency on the African continent.

With the Facebook timeline, geo-location and the selling of data on Facebook, I value my privacy more than knowing that an old high school friend caught a five pound bass yesterday. I don't need a tax agency looking at my Facebook account to try and pinpoint my whereabouts on a specific day. I don't want potential employers to know that I fancy both a single malt scotch and a tropical beer. I don't want to be judged professionally by a vegetarian because I hunt my own fish and lobster on the reef. In short, I want to control my public persona.

LinkedIn is perhaps the most useless social media thing out there. I was an early adopter of LindkedIn, and had a ton of contacts in many countries. I never benefited from being on LinkedIn at all in any way. It was a colossal time waster.

Social media is quite handy for being able to keep track of a large amount of people with minimal effort. However with the ubiquitous selling of data by these social media companies, they are crossing the line in respect to violating my privacy. Using datamining, with the limited amount of data that I put out there, social media can figure out my address, age, buying habits, probable income, and relationship status. No thanks.

What this world needs, is a social media platform that doesn't need to create profits by selling my private information. I wouldn't even mind looking at ads to fund it, however, social media and Facebook is not exactly an ideal platform for selling crap.

If you examine Facebook's reported financials, they make about $4 billion per year or about $4 per user. This is in spite of 33% growth in users. What they don't realize is that if I am stalking my old highschool sweetheart to see if the jock that she married is fat, poor and not interested in her any more, then I really don't want to buy anything but her love (or eventually Viagra when I get to the stage where I need it).

But back to the point -- I missed it for a few days, but now I find that I have a lot more time to devote to actually generating an income, or making entries in my blog. And being a LinkedIn dropout hasn't hurt my income stream at all. Could this be a trend?