Social Networks

The truth about social networks and webmails is starting to come out.

Few days ago Zephoria (aka Danah Boyd) wrote about her friend Bob who had bad encounters with Google:

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

Yesterday an article in the NY-Times told us that Facbook

…offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

Here is a video that tell us the truth about Facebook, from the research I did myself, most of it is true. Frightening.

and here is one that tell the truth about Google. Scary!