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Maryland corrections officer Robert Collins was recently forced to give his Facebook Login to his employer, the Maryland Department of Corrections, during a recertification interview in order to keep his job. The American Civil Liberties Union has taken the case and will be helping Mr. Collins sue the Maryland DOC.
This all started on January 25th, 2012, when the ACLU sent a letter to the Maryland DOC, in response to the requirement that all people applying for employment, as well as current employees in need of recertification, provide the state of Maryland with the logins and passwords to their personal social media profiles, for background checks.
“The demand for Facebook login information is not only a gross breach of privacy for Officer Collins and his friends, it raises significant legal concerns under the Federal Stored Communications Act and Maryland state law, which protect privacy rights and extend protections to electronic communications,” an ACLU spokesperson said in a statement. “As many of us begin to rely on sites like Facebook to stay connected to our friends and family, it’s important for employers and the government to keep in mind that, for most users, Facebook is a medium for private communications.”
Demanding a person’s private social network credentials is not the same thing as performing a background check on their public internet postings. With a login and passwords in hand, an employer has complete access to every message, picture, video, and post the person has ever made in their account. This is equivalent to a government agency rummaging through an employee or potential employees private mail.
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The United States government has proposed new laws designed to protect the online privacy of internet users. SNOPA, the Social Networking Online Protection Act, was created to prevent employers from requesting usernames and passwords from current employees, or prospective ones. This applies to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and also protects email and any other user generated content. Unfortunately, there have been several instances of such demands, and the implications on personal privacy are problematic.
Currently Internet users have few legal protections to their privacy. To make matters worse, it’s difficult to distinguish between what is considered private data and what is public. Because of this, many people are being required to hand over their private usernames and passwords in order to be considered for a job. This puts people in a tough situation, where they must choose between their job and their privacy, and it’s not how things should be in a free society.
When there are no laws preventing employers from requesting private login information, employers will continue to keep pushing. What do you guys think? Should the Federal government create laws to protect people’s private information? Is a law like this needed?
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Do you feel that most of your post and updates are going by unnoticed by people in your network on Facebook? Fret not! Facebook is testing a new feature that would make post made by users on the social network is more visible to friends, family and colleagues, by charging a small fee.
This feature is being tested among the Facebook users in New Zealand.
The Sun reported that users in theNew Zealandthought they were being scammed after they were presented with an option to “highlight” their post for $2.
Facebook later confirmed that they were “trialling” the feature, and charging was one of the options they were considering.
Facebook said it was constantly testing new features.
A Facebook spokesperson told BBC that it was testing different methods of highlighting posts, with charges ranging from 25p to £1.25 ($2).
Would you use the service if it rolls out?
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Facebook announced Wednesday that it will be launching it own App Center, a single location for the platform’s many applications.
The social networking giant announced that it will begin supporting paid apps, with Facebook charging users flat fees.
“Well-designed apps that people enjoy will be prominently displayed. Apps that receive poor ratings or don’t meet the quality guidelines won’t be listed,” Facebook’s Aaron Brady said in a blog post.
“The App Center is designed to grow mobile apps that use Facebook whether they’re on iOS, Android or the mobile web,”
Developers will have to create an app detail page to provide images and other details about their app in order to have their app listed in the App Center.
For mobile apps, the App Center not only recommends, but also showcases web-based applications embedded in Facebook and even those websites that are based around the Facebook logon.
The App Center will look different to different users, as they will receive recommendations based on their demographic and history rather than star ratings.
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Here’s a list of the top 25 websites online, ranked by the total number of inbound links. As you might expect, Facebook.com comes in at #1. These sites have more links pointing back to them than any other sites on the internet. If this isn’t an indicator of quality, I don’t know what is.
These days with so much information online, you really have to be careful where you consume your content. There are only so many hours in the day, and these days it’s just as important what information you ignore. You can rely on these sites for some of the highest quality content online.
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Facebook has launched a new File-Sharing feature for all Facebook Groups. This new feature will allow group members share files with each other, similar to Dropbox or Box.net.
Users will have the ability to upload most common file types, up to 25MB in size. Exceptions include .mp3 and .exe files. Users will have the ability to report abuse of the file-sharing feature, which will hopefully precent the spread of copyrighted or malicious material.
Facebook File-Sharing should be enabled for most users by this weekend. Stay tuned for more information.
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Today Facebook announced they will be launching Facebook App Center, an app store for Facebook Apps similar to Google’s Play Android Marketplace and the Apple iTunes App Market. The new Facebook app center will distribute social web, desktop, and mobile apps.
Facebook has grown to have a user-base of 900 million people, which means that there is a huge audience for Facebook apps. Developers should be all over this. It could be just like what happened with both Apple and Google’s app marketplaces. Smart developers should start building apps for the Facebook App Center right away.
Facebook App Center apps can be iOS apps, Android apps, web apps, mobile web apps, and even desktop apps. There will be both free and paid apps, which means there is a great incentive for developers to build and sell apps. The apps will also have the ability to handle in-app purchases in the near future.
Like the Apple iTunes Store, apps in the Facebook App Center will be rated based on a 5-star rating system. This will ensure the quailty of the apps, and like in iTunes, enable the best apps in a given category to rise to the top of the charts. And because Facebook knows so much about you, they will be able to suggest apps to you in a very targeted way. This sounds like a great monetization opportunity for both Facebook and developers across the world.
App developers will be given a detailed webpage, similar to an iTunes app store page, to describe the app. This will include a written description and screenshots.
We’re looking forward to the release of the Facebook App Center. Stay tuned to Facebook Login for more news on this and more!
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Employers have been using information on Facebook to assess potential hires for years, that’s nothing new. What is new is the extreme position some employers have taken in respect to their employee’s Facebook accounts.
There have been a string of reports in the media recently of employers requesting the Facebook login and password of potential hires, so that they can log into the account and look around. This is obviously an invasion of privacy, but apparently not in the minds of these employers.
What do you think? Should your boss be allowed to ask for your Facebook login and password. And should he or she then be allowed to log into your account an snoop around? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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In preparation for a May 2012 IPO, Facebook amended their S-1 filings today, revealing some interesting stats about the world’s largest social network. The biggest revelation is confirmation, directly from Facebook, that the site now has 901 Million global users. Of these, 526 Million are daily active users, up from 483 Million in late 2011.
Let’s just think about this for a minute… Facebook almost has 1 Billion users, and there are 7.7 Billion total human beings on the planet, which means approximately 1 out of every 7 people on earth now use Facebook, while 1 out of 14 use the site on a daily basis.
New numbers also illustrate Facebook’s mobile dominance, reporting 500 Million mobile users. What’s interesting here is that 83 Million of these mobile users access Facebook exclusively through the mobile app. Based on the trends in mobile internet usage, this number is bound to rise sharply in the near future.
Facebook can’t keep up growth like this forever, but things look very good at the moment, and the company appears poised to fully exploit the move to mobile, as users shift from the desktop web to the mobile web. How big can Facebook get? Only time will tell.
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