Following Maria Aspan's excellent article in the New York Times, Facebook has apparently softened their Draconian stance on not letting users leave Facebook. They went from making it impossible to delete your account to making it only slightly less cumbersome.
This is, of course, not nearly enough.
Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn in cash and shares.
The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo's board, is 62% above Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday.
Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.
It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.
If you would've asked me how I felt about this a couple years ago, I would've jumped on the anti-MS bandwagon with everyone else and worried that Microsoft would ruin Yahoo and her spin-offs, but today, Yahoo is the company that needs to be saved - and why not by Microsoft?
All those complaints from us concerned web users about Facebook violating our privacy rights seem to finally be paying off:
Facebook is to be quizzed about its data protection policies by the Information Commissioner's Office.
The investigation follows a complaint by a user of the social network who was unable to fully delete their profile even after terminating their account.
This is, of course, a great first step to ensuring that the world's most powerful social networking organization realizes that its customers actually do care about how their personal information is used and how it's shared with other companies, partners, and government organizations.
I've had the same phone for some time now; a 3 1/2 year old English/Arabic Nokia 7610 that has been outstanding since the day I got it. It's also built like a tank. Except with things like my laptop and my camera - two devices I use every day that are critical to my work, and are more extensions of myself than just tools - I'm generally very clumsy. I've dropped, soaked, stepped on, crushed, and even threw (don't ask) this phone more times (and in more brutal ways) than I can imagine, yet it still works the way it did when I first got it. I've used it mostly (surprise!) to make phone calls, but at some time or another it was also being used to:
... from cocaine and hand guns.
So, Medellin, Colombia is a pretty hot place. Not temperature wise though, the weather is quite perfect all year round from my point of view.
Like I'd mentioned, we found a pretty sweet flat up in the El Poblado barrio of Medellin (if you're in Montreal, think economic scale of Westmount but urban development style of Ville St-Laurent). We've got 2 nice bedrooms (I let David have the master room, since I'm such a caballero and all), 3 (!) bathrooms, and a nice full kitchen, along with a big, shared dining / living room and a couple balconies. It costs not much more than a third of what a place like this could cost in Montreal, I imagine.
After having settled in some, I was able to get (finally) getting some work done, when all of a sudden my laptop stopped charging. Turns out the power supply for this $120 Toshiba Portege overheated, and I spent the next day or so trying to find a place that could help me, finally giving in and paying the $80 to a repair shop for 10 minutes of work in the Monterrey shopping center down by El Poblado metro.
For those of you following the ever-entertaining saga about Facebook data mining the entire human population (except for the smart ones), here's another zinger about their relationship with TRUSTe, the supposed Internet privacy and trust organization founded in 1997. First, some extracts from their mission statement and website:
" TRUSTe® is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to enabling individuals and organizations to establish trusting relationships based on respect for personal identity and information in the evolving networked world.
Advancing privacy and trust for a networked world, we certify and monitor web site privacy and email policies, monitor practices, and resolve thousands of consumer privacy problems every year."
You've probably seen their logo on various sites you may visit, such as eBay. This 'privacy seal' is supposed to ensure that the website in question has trustworthy online privacy policies. Even though I've done a fair amount of work on the periphery of web privacy standards in Canada in the past few years, I'd never really crossed paths with TRUSTe other than noticing their seal on a few sites, and automatically assuming that the site in question cared more about privacy or protecting user data than another site which doesn't have the seal. For someone like me and the other eight people or so who actually care about user privacy on the web, it was like a warm fuzzy blanket that made me feel more comfortable visiting the site in question, and I never paid more heed to it than that.
A few days ago, we had some considerable snowfall in Montreal. It came down pretty hard and didn't let up for nearly three days. I probably ended up shoveling 4 or 5 normal snowfalls worth of snow, some light, some heavy.
As the first real snowstorm of the season, it was enough to shut down most schools and non-essential services. While this didn't affect me directly very much since I can work from home, the indirect effect turned out to be that I ran into lots of my neighbors who I hadn't seen in ages, shoveling the fronts of our homes together.
I've just gotten back an email from TRUSTe regarding my complaint about the inability to fully close a Facebook account:
Dear Steven Mansour,
Thank you for submitting your privacy complaint through the TRUSTe Watchdog Dispute Resolution program. The TRUSTe Compliance Team has reviewed the details of your complaint and we have determined that it is a valid privacy complaint. We have contacted www.facebook.com on your behalf and have outlined the steps necessary for proper resolution.
Because you gave permission for the site to contact you directly, please be advised that you may receive emails directly from the site regarding resolution of your Watchdog complaint. [...]
That's great news for all of us who've been concerned about Facebook's stubborn - and Orwellian - refusal to voluntarily close user accounts when specifically asked to. Let's see how Facebook responds.
While I'm still getting comments on my post about How to Leave Facebook, around the web many more instances of discontent with Facebook's policies are rearing their heads.
First, it was comforting to know that I was not alone in the not-so-pleasurable experience of manually deleting all my Facebook content piecemeal. Kate Raynes-Goldie writes:
It took me just under four hours, sitting there clicking delete delete delete. It also didn't help that their software seems to get a bit screwy when you delete a lot of stuff fast. At one point I had left a bunch of groups, but it still had me listed as a member, but wouldn't let me leave again because I wasn't a member. Once you've had your hours of fun, you have to email Facebook again and ask them nicely to delete your account. I thought all of this was an insane requirement, so I emailed our friend Facebook Peter. The reply:
... via Sascha