Facebook pages that have attracted large numbers of planking fans have pics of plankers doing their thing on chimneys, the backs of camels, railway lines, fire hydrants, escalators, street signs ... you name it. Planking Australia boasts over 100,000 fans and hundreds of pictures. On some American comment threads WTF reactions would suggest that not everyone is as enthusiastic.

It's not hard to understand the appeal. It's free and it's fun for those who get off on lying around in strange places. All you need is a place to plank, a cellphone or other picture taking device and a bud or two to bear witness.

It can also be high risk and possibly illegal. A few planking-related incidents in Australia made the news recently. Nate Shaw, a 20-year old from Gladstone was arrested for planking on a police car. He was charged after the cops spotted a pic of the stunt on Facebook.

There was also an unfortunate tragedy. In Brisbane a planker in his 20's named Acton Beale fell to his death from a balcony railing. Incidents such as this have prompted police in Queensland to consider placing dodgy planking stunts in the Unauthorized High Risk Activity category.

Link also to MSNBC - BBC

So the micro-managing of the audience is really no surprise. The larger question is do Canadians want their country Harperized along similar lines.

Funny yet disturbing video beneath asking Harper to stop "creeping" Awish Aslam's facebook.





*Refresh page if YouTube video is slow to load

Link also to related stories - CBC - Toronto Star - Toronto Star

Virgin Atlantic has fired 13 cabin crew for joking on Facebook about faulty engines, cockroaches and referring to passengers as "chavs."

The Guardian reports:


Companies that go sleuthing on Facebook for evidence against employees could well have something to hide. Remarks about faulty engines and cockroaches might just be tall stories coming from disgruntled employees, on the other hand there may be something to the allegations. Virgin's heavy handed approach tends to re-enforce the latter impression.

Privacy on the internet has many loopholes. The net is a public domain and anything you post can be retrieved and potentially used against you, no matter how justified a person might feel about speaking out.

Virgin employees are far from the only Facebook casualties. A guy named James Brennan was fired from his job with John Lewis Partnership in London. Brennan had the bright idea of using "Fuck the Partnership" as his Facebook status.

As Ice-T said : “freedom of speech, just watch what you say”.

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) has filed a complaint against Facebook with Canada's Privacy Commissioner. The substance of the complaint is that Facebook collects sensitive information about users and employs it without their permission.

There are legitimate security concerns with Facebook use, also with the site's lack of transparency. Privacy protection options aren't always spelled out clearly. Facebook's claim that "we pride ourselves on the industry leading controls we offer users over their private information," doesn't tell the whole story.

The outcry over Beacon is an example of Facebook's controversial data mining practices.

Facebook is partnered with sites such as Blockbuster, Fandango, Kongregate, Vox, NY Times, TypePad and others. Thanks to the miracle of javascript, these sites are in a position to relay info to Facebook in the form of a "user alert." Users online purchases show up on their news feed. Great eh! Some poor innocent who purchased sex toys, leather underwear or other racy items online risks having the info show up on his/her social graph. Exactly the type of info a person would want to share with the extended family.

Facebook has since responded to pressure from groups such as Move.On Org. and has changed some settings so that off-line purchases aren't published by default. However data is still transferred from affiliated sites to Facebook and there isn't much users can do about it.

Why does it require a major uproar to get Facebook to act? They weren't as up-front about Beacon as they could have been. Their page about Beacon was more or less a PR exercise, hyping the cool aspects while understating privacy concerns. It's hardly surprising some users felt they had been overexposed.

A lot of Facebook users are students, some in their early teens. Not all will be sufficiently tech-savvy to use their setting options to maximum advantage. The Canadian study accuses Facebook of "deceiving its users" and this applies most of all to those users who have vulnerability issues as a result of lack of knowledge.

Harley Finklestein, who took part in the Canadian study pointed out some of his concerns:

"Our investigation found that ... even if you select the strongest privacy settings, your information may be shared more widely if your Facebook Friends have lower privacy settings ... As well, if you add a third-party application offered on Facebook, you have no choice but to let the application developer access all your information even if they don't need it."

The director of the Canadian clinic, Phillipa Lawson, has described Facebook and similar social networking sites as "a minefield of privacy invasion:"

Related story - here

Salisbury university president, Janet Dudley-Eshbach has managed to trigger a firestorm as a result of innocently posting vacation photos on her Facebook profile. She may have been trying to generate a few laughs among her inner circle however it seems privacy settings let her down.

Two photos have generated the most comment. One shows her swinging a stick at a Mexican who is embracing her daughter. An accompanying caption informs viewers that she had to “beat off the Mexicans because they were constantly flirting with my daughter”. The other photo shows a tapir. The caption makes mention of the large size of the animal’s genitalia.

The photos went up on her Facebook album on Feb 3 2007. They were available to anyone in the Salibury/Maryland Network for eight months. The president removed her Facebook profile when she was contacted by the media about the photos.

The blow-back on campus has been a bit overheated. The photo showing the president brandishing the stick was rigged - all the participants were clearly in on the act. They appear to be having fun acting out a charade. The caption might be regarded as somewhat questionable given Dudley-Eshbach’s position.

The content of the president's album managed to rile a number of students. Melissa Holt had this to say :

"I don't think it's very professional of her. She's representing Salisbury and by going out and having a Facebook, she's known as the Salisbury U president. She needs to be respectful as of everybody's opinions and backgrounds."

Dudley-Eshbach released a statement through the SU media relations department, which in part reads:

The rather anal reactions to these photos on the part of the offended are typical of a PC attitude that sees potential offense just about everywhere. It can get pretty tedious. What this storm-in-a-teacup really says is that Dudley-Eshbach is human and can misjudge occasionally, as most of us have been known to do. She has apologized and set the record straight.

The larger lesson out of this to all paying attention is ... get your privacy settings straight.

Related story - here

Those who are familiar with facebook claim there is plenty of material on its pages that might be deemed offensive by some people. Everything from people posing in skimpy thongs to racy prose. Compared to that type of material a photo of a mother breastfeeding her infant seems innocent. Not by the standards of facebook apparently. It has been busily deleting photos of breastfeeding moms.

This has ticked off the women who set up a new facebook group named - “Hey facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” On last check the group had 10,200 members and is growing.

It’s no surprise women have been angered by the crackdown. Could anything be more inoffensive than an image of a mother breastfeeding her child? It is a depiction that has been immortalized in art throughout the centuries. In the church of Santa Maria Degli Angeli in Rome there is a painting in the apse named The Madonna of the Angels, that depicts Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus. None of the religious have logged complaints.

In the hard edged world in which we live, the sight of a mother nurturing an infant in the time honored fashion is humanizing. It touches the heart. Have we become so oddly hypersensitive that there are people who now actually consider the act of breastfeeding in public to be somewhat pornographic or even obscene?

A number of Canadian women were impacted by the facebook decision. Karen Speed from Edmonton had five of her photos deleted and her account closed down. Others are fighting back. Sarah Kaplan, is the owner of Evymama, a breastfeeding and maternity wear shop in Toronto. Kaplan points out that the World Health Organization recommends breast feeding until the child is two years of age. She has been working to help make breastfeeding more socially acceptable.

Kelli Roman, a Californian mother of two, also fell victim to facebook policing. Several photos were deleted from her personal profile.

There is inconsistency in the facebook policy on this issue. An article in the Toronto Star points out that there are currently photos of breastfeeding moms on facebook. These can be found in groups such as La Leche League, Canadian Breastfeeding Mommies.

It would appear that facebook is drawing distinctions between breastfeeding pictures with breast and nipple in evidence, and those in which the 'offending parts' are partly covered. Facebook spokesperson, Meredith Chin, reportedly said - “photos containing an exposed breast do violate our terms and are removed.”

Facebook is sending the wrong message with this approach. After all a lot of these pictures appear in the context of a group with members who have a shared interest in breastfeeding. If the group was named “Hot Lactating Chicks” I could see there might be an issue - but “Breastfeeding Moms” is about as user friendly as it can get.

Related story - here

Recently Facebook code ended up on the internet. This is operational code and doesn't allow direct access, but might nonetheless provide hackers with an edge when it comes to acquiring personal information. According to a Facebook spokesperson the code was accidentally published due to a "bug". The statement also sought to reassure users that the published code in no way compromises user data.

Facebook has become hugely popular with around 30 million users worldwide. This has also made it a top site for hackers and it has been the target of serial attacks.

Since Facebook is considered secure by most users, people have been fairly free about publishing personal information. However there are vulnerabilities in the Facebook set-up that could potentially create problems.

Aside from the concerns about the recent code leak, Facebook protocols are open to abuse. There have been reports of criminals posing as "friends". Once they are approved they can set up contacts with other users and extend their access. This potentially allows them to harvest information that could be used in identity theft scams. Info such as birth date, job, marital status, email address, location can be used by fraudsters to open up accounts.

Stats from the UK suggest these scams are on the upswing. A fraud prevention service, CIFAS, claims that the early part of 2007 saw a record number of frauds, including some 40,000 identity thefts. This trend is supported by records from the payment industry association, Apacs, that saw a 44% increase in online banking fraud last year.

The code leak is just the latest in a series of problems for Facebook. The founder of the website, Mark Zuckerberg, is in court defending himself against allegations brought by the founders of a similar site called ConnectU. They allege that they hired Zuckerberg to help with some programming, and that rather than help them out he stole their ideas. Zuckerberg's lawyers dismiss this allegation and claim that the lawsuit is nothing short of an effort to hijack the huge success of Facebook in hopes of cashing in. Hardly surprising, when you consider that the value of Facebook has been pegged at around $10 billion.

The troubles that have been mounting for Facebook of late include advertising woes. Vodafone and AA recently pulled their money when they discovered that their ads had been appearing on pages run by the British National Party. This is a far right political party in the UK that is racist and anti-immigrant.

What can you do to stay safer online? There are few basics you should definitely pay attention to if security is a concern. Use complex passwords. Don't use the same password for all the sites you access. Use only one password per site. This way you can have confidence that should anyone hack a password they won't be able to use it on any of your other login pages.

Don't choose security questions that might be known by friends or family - for example your mother's name. Select answers known only to yourself. Don't open yourself up to contacts online. Be careful who you add as "friends". Verify their information carefully before offering approval. Don't release personal data online such as phone number and address, even on social networking services that claim to guarantee security. It's always best to err on the side of caution.

Try to avoid public access computers of the type you find in internet cafes, especially if you are entering personal data. If you have no choice, make sure you log out properly at the end of the session.