‘Like’ it or not, developers can be crafty
Facebook is essentially one of the biggest social networks in the world and has a population that rivals most countries. So having access to such a large spread of people, it's not surprising that advertisers and opportunist business types salivate at the thought of tapping into such a huge market. When Facebook announced the advent of the platform (essentially opening it up to third party applications for developers) you can imagine the dollar signs appearing in peoples eyes.
However you can't help but think that with such an unregulated space, it is quite easily open to abuse. Privacy has been a sore subject for facebook for years with much media scrutiny but applications are generally user instigated agreements. Tick "agree" and you're giving consent for the application to consult and examine your personal data. Your contacts, last meal, relationship status, age, that last status update about your cat licking its groin are all up for data processing and crunching.
Most of the time this is relatively harmless as demonstrated by credulous applications such as "What was no.1 in the charts on the day you were born" and so on. But there is room to take advantage of those pesky terms and conditions and there is room to deceive through the naivety of the uninitiated.
The reason why I am posting this today is to discuss something of great concern that's impacted my facebook forays and offers an insight into the virility and danger of agreeing to hand over your personal data to a third party. To put things into context of my experiences, let me take a patronising look back on how Facebook generally works. When a friend derives some enjoyment or mirth from something connected to your profile, be it status updates or photos, they can register their like of this by the age old thumbs up/thumbs down system. A small notification is sent to you mentioning their activity on your profile and a small boost of ego (+2) is credited in your mind.
So when you receive a notification saying "X Likes your photo", especially when it's from someone you haven't spoken to for a while and having not been aware of any recent uploads of photos you can't help but feel curious.
Upon clicking the "your photo" link you are taken to a page asking you to install the "Like" application. Obviously after seeing this was just a really simple ruse into spoofing the "like" functionality of the network (notice the capital L), it's a really effective way of getting people to install your application. Unfortunately a few of my peers have been less alert to the implications of this and I've been receiving a small trickle of "X Likes your photo!" notifications over the past few days.
It's not just me who has noticed this, the guys at allfacebook have advised their readers to avoid the application like the plague and some of the commenters suggest it's linked to a series of fake Farmville websites
I'm going to take an educated guess at the fact that the application sends out a notification to everyone on your contact list and chances are a good proportion of them will click "Accept". The virile nature of facebook combined with curiosity being the main draw here especially when people make references to photographs of your person, allows the messages and application to spread pretty quickly.
I'm not sure what happens after you click accept, in terms of the application itself anyway, maybe it's just an experiment by a developer wanting to cause a bit of havoc around the world but you can see that things like this have sinister implications. Education might be key but people still get drawn into those "You have won a prize!" and "You have a virus, click here to remove!" pop-up dialogs that cause a nuisance to many amateur desktops, but when you are dealing with private data such as that on Facebook you can't help but be concerned at such rogue activities.
Needless to say I think the Facebook police may have taken a visit during the course of me writing this post as the application seems to have disappeared from their servers, but it just goes to show that for a brief period it was able to spread through the network.
Doesn't that scare you?
I’ve joined the cult of Mac
Image copyright of Apple
U-turns are a funny thing aren't they, a change of tactic, view or policy tends to be a great tool in the arsenal of your humble politician. While ridicule and merriment from the press may ensue, most of the time these decisions tend to (eventually) be for the right reasons.
This is the position I currently find myself in, for I have taken the somewhat unthinkable path into becoming a fully fledged user of Apple products, a horrifying concept to my previous self I'm sure.
A gradual , creeping transition has ensued over the past three or so years to soften my rather adamant views with the integration of the iPod, then the iPhone and most recently the MacBook (the only Apple product line that doesn't prefix an 'i' to its name it seems) into my life.
It was inevitable I'm sure but it's always been one of those dividing lines between users of technology. You were either in one group or the other and there was no in between, the supposed 'rivalry' between Apple and...the PC has been running between geeks for years.
To a casual outsider the Apple crowd could be viewed as a congregation of trendy coffee shop bellends who would whoop, cheer and bow to the on screen presence of Steve Jobs at Apple's famous speeches and product launches. The PC user just seemed like everyone else or stereotypically - the boring business type who spent their time creating spreadsheets and emailing prostitutes.
But these are outdated and immature views of what is essentially a capitalists wet dream, the church of Apple may have a following, but more importantly they're worshippers with cash that they're willing to part with.
So as I type this post on my beloved MacBook (second hand, how Apple get people to pay > £800 for their hardware I don't know) I'm finding myself enjoying the cult of the mac and it seems I'm not alone, just take a look at Charlie Brooker's dramatic turn of opinion!
Ending on that note, here is the obligatory screenshot of my new machine
Hello world!
As it is customary to christen most ventures in the technology spectrum with a toe poking "Hello World", I figured it would be appropriate to begin my new writing space for brain dumps with the greatest video on the internet. Ever.