So I am at party and someone is really interested in an event I heard about on Facebook. In fact she is so keen she wants to go asap. She insists and we are in the middle of nowhere so she logs out of her Facebook account on her Blackberry and hands it to me. I log in, find the event, send her the info and log out myself. Seems straightforward. We continue the other discussion and she shows everyone how cool it is that her brand new Blackberry shows up pictures of her friends when one of her friends calls. “It did it all by itself!”
Two days later I log in to my Facebook account and I am greeted by a message. Facebook noticed that I have been using Facebook for Blackberry. Would I like to import my contacts? What contacts? Her contacts! All I did was click “yes” and all her Facebook contacts came to me!
I realise that for any American reading this I am already way off the mark. This shouldn’t be a blog post, this should be a law suit already! (OK, it is all documented with screen grabs etc just in case I change my mind…) With the amount of negative publicity they are getting these days about privacy problems, this could make me a fair amount of money. It is almost a media frenzy right now without adding one of the most popular mobile platforms for accessing Facebook to the mix.
The beauty of this one from a litigation point of view is that nobody can escape the blame. I looked over the technical aspects of setting up Blackberry Enterprise Server and the options for social networking integration and sure, we could blame Vodafone (the service provider) for anything mistakenly set up in her account. But then it was the Facebook application on my computer that offered me her contacts! And she had done everything “properly” by logging out before handing it to me.
But no, I won’t add to the calls for everyone to delete their accounts from Facebook. Yet. In fact I just started a second Facebook account for myself in English. I will just be more careful not to post any information more personal than I do on this public website. And for sure I won’t be handing my Blackberry to anyone at parties…
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