Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The New Sharing

This I think is something that is going to come back and bite!
More and more "Social" Apps are asking and getting access to your personal data. The premise behind this is that when you share your data then you will doing yourself a favour and you will get some sort of reward. These rewards can take the form of more and more useful information for you and even some sort of financial benefit.

These benefits can be in the form of coupons or discounts for products and services. I maintain that the price you have to pay in loss of control of your information it too high. I am not alone, I have recently (April 2012) seen a few articles that point this out and there are also articles dating back to 2010 when Facebook announced their Open Graph Interface/Protocol. What Open Graph allows programmers of Facebook Apps is to get access to Facebook users profile data. The way that it is supposed to work is that you have to give the App permission to do so. However, the fact that the mechanism exists to allow the retrieval of your personal data and also that many companies cannot be trusted makes the whole situation one that is fraught with potential to abuse.

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