Friday, August 27, 2010

Correction re: Again?!

Dear MoveOn member,

We sent you an email earlier this week about Facebook's new "Places" application, but in speaking with representatives of Facebook have come to understand that the email contained factual errors.

We apologize—we take the accuracy of our emails very seriously. So we wanted to send you corrected information right away.

In our original email we said that if you use Places, you could have your location revealed without giving permission or being warned. That's not true.

When you first sign up to use Places, you have to click through a dialogue box that informs you that your friends can check you in to locations once you sign up.

Places still raises concerns from a privacy perspective, however. If you want to sign up for Places without automatically letting your friends check you in, it's a pretty complicated process. You have to know to click "learn more" and then navigate to your privacy controls and disable this feature. Clearly, it would be simpler and more straightforward to include a separate step to explicitly enable friends to check you in—or make it an option when you sign up.

But we blew it when we said there was no warning, and we're sorry.

As always, we encourage you to visit your Facebook privacy settings and update them to ensure your personal privacy: www.Facebook.com/privacy

Thanks,

Kat 

P.S. If you're wondering how this happened, we did test this to check out the privacy warnings. But unfortunately we tested it on an account where the privacy settings had been set to disallow this feature—so the warning did not show up.

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PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. This email was sent to eddie alfaro on August 27, 2010. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here.

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