Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Privacy? Paranoia?

analysis
Jan 25, 20082 mins

Over on LooseWire (which I found via AllThingsD) Jeremy Wagstaff asks "Who Needs Enemies When You Have Facebook Friends?" He goes on to suggest that "It might be time to remove a) all your data and b) all third party apps from your Facebook profile." His point is that Facebook applications can access your private data, and the private data of all your friends. Turned around, that means that a

Over on LooseWire (which I found via AllThingsD) Jeremy Wagstaff asks “Who Needs Enemies When You Have Facebook Friends?” He goes on to suggest that “It might be time to remove a) all your data and b) all third party apps from your Facebook profile.”

His point is that Facebook applications can access your private data, and the private data of all your friends. Turned around, that means that an application installed by any of your Facebook friends can access your private data.

This turns into a game of “Who do you trust?” In the case of a teenager building cookbook Facebook applications with PHP in his den, I have to wonder whether any trust I’ve placed may have been misplaced. When the developer is a legitimate company, for example ActiveState, then I’m probably not so worried.

One of the comments to Wagstaff’s post points out that Greylock Venture Capital is one of Facebook’s investors. That’s no surprise. It goes on to point out that one of Greylock’s senior partners, Howard Cox, is also on the board of In-Q-Tel, a.k.a. IQT, which is the firm that funded Google Earth back when it was Keyhole. IQT’s mission is to identify, adapt, and deliver technology solutions that support the mission of the CIA and the broader U.S. intelligence community.

Hunh.

This is a slim thread of guilt by association, right up there with tying Saddam to bin Laden. But it makes you think, doesn’t it?

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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