Do you share your personal info with everyone on Facebook? If so, there’s a decent chance that data is now part of a file — containing information for around 100 million users of the social networking site — that’s now making its way around the Web.
The file was compiled by a security consultant who wanted to show how easy it was to harvest all the information from Facebook users who hadn’t made their profiles private. The info contained in the file does not include phone numbers, e-mail or postal addresses, though it’s conceivable that this information could be just as easily harvested.
Facebook poo-pooed the news, saying that the information on the shared file is already publicly available:
People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want… In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook… No private data is available or has been compromised.
While it is true that all the information in the file is readily available because those users didn’t make their profiles private, a privacy expert complains to the BBC that the massive size of this data harvest shows that many Facebook users don’t understand their privacy settings:
It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn’t have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there’s an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence… People did not understand the privacy settings and this is the result.
Viagra for kids? That sounds… well, wrong. But apparently, low doses of the erectile dysfunction drug can help children stricken by a rare lung disorder. It could also earn Pfizer a six-month extension on the patent for its blue-chip brand.
Pulmonary arterial hypertension strikes around 600 children each year, and some doctors have had success treating young patients with small doses of Viagra (produced under the name Revatio).
An FDA advisory panel will meet Thursday to discuss whether or not to recommend approving Revatio.
If the FDA, who originally requested that Pfizer develop the for-kids version of Viagra, gives the thumbs-up to Revatio, Pfizer will be rewarded with a six-month extension of its exclusive patent on Viagra.
The Viagra patent is set to expire in 2012, after which other drug companies would be free to sell generic versions of the drug’s active ingredient, Seldenafil. Considering that Pfizer made $1.89 billion from Viagra in 2009, an extra six months of exclusive sales would be a huge financial windfall for the company.
It would also mean another six months of commercials featuring middle-aged men jamming out to “Viva Viagra” in their garage… Lord help us all.
My 3-year-old says “I don’t have to go potty,” takes a dramatic pause, then follows up with “But I do!” According to reader Alex, Bank of America echoes the delivery technique. BofA tells him it has received his e-bills. But it hasn’t!
Alex writes:
I use Bank of America’s online bill pay to pay all my bills. About two years ago I got a new credit card number for my Chase credit card, but everything continued to work fine with my online bill pay. Fast forward to last month, when Bank of America stopped receiving e-bills from Chase. You wouldn’t know this if you logged into my bill pay account, where it says “Receiving e-bills” under my Chase account (see attached picture). BoA only notified me of this problem through my “Bank of America mail”… yes, that tiny gray “mail” button in the corner, sandwiched between the location finder and help… who reads that??
They didn’t send me a real e-mail (I have Gmail so I can verify this), and I was duped by the innocuous “Receiving e-bills” message into thinking everything was okay. As a result I missed a payment. Chase was kind enough to refund the late fee after I paid up, but BoA’s e-bill representative insisted there’s nothing wrong with the web site, even though the “Receiving e-bills” status directly contradicts the notification that they sent to my Bank of America mailbox, which said that they couldn’t receive e-bills for the account. How hard would it be to program the status to change to “Error Receiving e-bills” in red, whenever this happens? I know that I was stupid and shouldn’t have relied on BoA (I actually caught the error in Mint), but I want to alert any other Consumerist readers who still use BoA that “Receiving e-bills” does NOT necessarily mean that BoA is receiving e-bills.
Has anyone suffered a similar failing with BofA or online bill pay at another bank?
Something is amiss with the water in Brockton, MA. No, it doesn’t smell or taste funny — it’s just costing some of the town’s citizens one hell of a lot of money. In fact, some residential customers have been charged as much as $100,000 for one month’s worth of H20.
Unwilling to drown in this erroneous debt, a number of the overcharged Brocktonians took their concerns to the City Council last night, who voted nearly unanimously to open an investigation into the water department’s billing practices.
One of the recipients of a $100K invoice is a single mother of three who says she hasn’t been able to resolve the issue with the department:
My biggest issue is that I still have a higher water bill than a commercial business, and no one can explain that to me.
A Brockton City Council member agrees that there is a problem:
We have a lot of faulty water meters out there. There has to be. Nobody gets $100,000 water bill. I’m sorry.
Movie theaters aren’t always the safest of places. People bump into one another, sit a little too close, kick seats, check cell phones too often and folks tend to get irritable. On the heels of a stabbing at Comic-Con International in San Diego last week, Ranker put together a list of the 10 most violent movie theater attacks.
Though technically not a movie theater, but a convention hall where they show movies, a dude wearing a Harry Potter shirt stabbed another guy in the face with a pen over a seat for… wait for it… the movie “Paul”, a film starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost that isn’t even directed by Edgar Wright.
Hall H at the 2010 Comic Con International Convention was supposed to be for a panel featuring actor Seth Rogen discussing the science-fiction comedy “Paul,” but instead it became residence for some nerd evil.
Showing once again that deodorant would solve almost ANY social problem, the two males got into a dispute about sitting too close to each other and one guy finally stabbed the other one on the side of his eye with a pen. That’s one way to clear some space.
The victim was taken to the hospital with a minor cut while the attacker was arrested and booked for assault with a deadly weapon. Yeah, you read that right. Deadly.
Click on the link below for the full list. What’s the closest you ever came to blows (in either sense of the word) in the theater?
After months of speculation about what price General Motors would slap on its first electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt, we finally have an answer, and it’s an expensive one. The Chevy — oops, we mean Chevrolet — vehicle will debut with a price tag of $41,000.
That puts the Volt squarely in the luxury range of GM vehicles, somewhere between the Cadillac CTS and the Corvette Coupe.
Knocking down the price a bit for buyers is the $7,500 federal tax credit for Volt buyers. Additionally, a number of states are offering their own tax incentives for car buyers who go electric.
But what do you think? Is a $41,000 car (or even a $33,500 one) the right way to introduce electric cars to the mass market? Or is it better to keep this market small until the technology has been developed further?
In just the last few months, Zug.com writer Bayan Rabbani has tested his own limits — as well as those of the employees — with his 24-hour outings to Walmart and Starbucks. Now, he’s gone to the next most logical location: 24 Hour Fitness.
Unlike Bayan’s previous retail camping trips, 24 Hour Fitness got wind of his impending trip to one of their gyms. And even though news of the stunt got all the way up to corporate HQ, the company still decided to let him go through with it.
They might have regretted that decision when, around 20 hours into his day-long workout, Bayan slipped into an animal-print snuggie to do some sweating in style.
During his time at the gym, Bayan managed to slip in five different classes, from yoga to pilates to spinning, where he made the mistake of positioning his groggy butt directly in front of the instructor.
“I’m not sure what molested me more: The bike seat or the instructor yelling “HARDER! FASTER! MORE! YOU GOT IT! POWEERRR!!!!” he Tweeted from the gym.
He also consumed a ridiculous amount of protein, ordered pizza for himself and the staff while he lounged in the hot tub, and lost a grand total of one pound.
Being POTUS makes you age prematurely, and Lady Gaga is stuck in a 360 deal that takes a cut of everything she does. Screw that, I wanna be CEO. The Wall Street Journal has listed the top paid CEOs of the last decade, which is topped by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at $1.84 billion. Steve Jobs comes in fourth with $749 million, and Capital One’s Richard Fairbank is fifth at $569 million. The WSJ also notes that “four of the top 25 CEOs worked at financial companies, two on Wall Street.”
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t Queen Elizabeth II’s decision personally to join Flickr, but somebody over there across the pond in London has had the bright idea to join the rest of the online world and create a Flickr account for the British royal family.
In an attempt to catch up to all the online fun, the British Monarchy Flickr account will showcase the residents of Buckingham Palace. The royals already have a Twitter account and YouTube channel. So we’ll get to see Prince William and the gang sipping tea and playing polo, as well as older pictures chronicling the monarchy’s ancestry.
Don’t think you can get all sassy if you see a pic of Prince Harry choosing his Halloween costume — comments will not be allowed on the over 600 photos from palace life.
And though we’d like to think that Queen Elizabeth will be on her laptop eagerly uploading photos of kittens doing funny things, the palace is staying mum on her personal involvement.
“We never comment on the queen’s personal use of technology,” a spokeswoman told the New York Daily News, while speaking on condition of anonymity in line with palace policy.
Here’s to hoping they join the Consumerist.com photo pool on Flickr so we can make good use of Prince Charles’ baby pictures. Now that the royals are registered, all they have to do is go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right, and start hitting “send to group” on those royal photographic gems.
Back in the day, advertising was supposed to be kinda sneaky — yeah, we knew companies were directing ads at us consumers in an effort to get us to buy stuff, but no one talked about it. Now, social media heavies like Twitter, Zynga (makers of Farmville, Mafia Wars and other time leechers) and LinkedIn are being totally open about their efforts.
Fortune.com has a video snippet up from a panel of COOs and CEOS from the aforementioned companies, discussing their innovations in advertising and basically, how they’re getting suckers like us to pay in.
Zynga’s founder and CEO, Mark Pincus, weighs in on the future of ads in social media with the example of a recent campaign for General Mills new organic Cascadian farms blueberries. It’s easy, really — just introduce the berries in virtual form on Farmville, and voila! Millions of game players plant the digital crops and then go on to make pies they can’t actually eat or let those imaginary berries sit too long in the online fridge until they’re forced to throw them out.
It just seems interesting that companies are being so open about their tactics. We should be overjoyed at the transparency, but it feels a little condescending to be informed of how we, as consumers, are being targeted.
But then again, people love their Tweeting, winking, and virtual food. Carry on!
