Tuesday 18 December 2012

Facebook's mobile syncing tool raises concerns

Facebook's new "Photo Sync" tool lets you automatically sync photos you take using your mobile phone to your Facebook account. Although these photos are first uploaded to a private album, it still means potentially embarrassing (or just plain pointless) photographs could potentially be shared with just the click of a button; raising privacy concerns.

Let's not forget that even if you're the only one with access to the photos, Facebook could potentially, behind the scenes, use the information from them to build a greater profile of you. Images taken with mobile phones may contain geo-location data, that is, the co-ordinates of where they were taken. Once Facebook is aware of your movements, it could potentially localise the advertisements that you see, and perhaps even show you advertisements from the exact places you've been visiting. This could well be handy, but you'd want to be aware they were doing it - or at least opt-into it.

Facebook also has facial recognition technology in place and (again, potentially) it could identify people in the photos you put into your private album without them even knowing.

While it's supposed to be a convenient addition to the app, it could end up as the complete opposite if you're the type of person to take photos that are only relevant to you, rather than the world at large.

And, if you're on a limited bandwidth plan, you have to make sure that you set your photos so they can only be uploaded when you're connected to a fixed internet connection, rather than a mobile one.

No comments:

Post a Comment