V's dashboard

Agree. The more button is very snazzy and all that, but now I can't access or delete my own data without a ridiculously disproportionate amount of effort. And that starts to have data-protection implications!

What's the delay with this, guys?

Saying "we're working on it" doesn't "solve the problem", it just suggests a solution is on its way. The problem will be "solved" when people can see Facebook updates again.

@mmalone

Thank you for getting back to me. It is a fair point that the inclusion of location information on notes means solving this is not straight forward. But if you are not yet satisfied with the solution you are able to provide, surely the responsible course of action is to not include this feature on your site - until you are in a position to provide users with an appropriate level of control of their data privacy. That the programming challenge is not negligible is not your users problem, and not something that should impact their data security.

If I managed a billing website, or a bank website, and had not yet completed an encryption algorithm that would permit secure storage of user's credit card information on an application server, it would be highly irresponsible of me to store that credit card information and tell them, if they complained, that "I haven't got around to coding security yet". It would be putting the user's data at risk for the sake of deploying incomplete functionality.

What concerns me - as someone who has managed billing and bank websites before - is that your priority does not appear to be safeguarding user's data.

If your "location privacy" option does not apply to Fire Eagle data (and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't) then this should be made absolutely clear in the privacy options. It is not.

If there is a problem providing full privacy functionality this should also be made clear both on the privacy settings and within the fire eagle integration dialogues - It is not.

Your users should not have to be telling you this. That they are tells me I cannot trust your organisation with my data - because unless I'm continually looking over your shoulder to see what you've done with my data I have no confidence you will be handling it responsibly.

My account is now deleted. I suspect we won't agree on this, and I'm not really interested in corresponding any more about it - I've already taken the time to spell out to you my concerns and its really up to you what you decide to do or not do about it. But I hope you will consider the risk that prioritising incomplete functionality over user data privacy may pose to your organisation commercially, if not to your users personally.

Disappointing to see Pownce has just repeated their complete ignorance of user's data privacy by displaying Fire Eagle location information on public profiles even where the users have chosen to conceal their location information from the public, within the privacy settings.

Disappointing, but not much of a surprise.

The answer you've posted does *not* solve the problem or explain why it exists. Disregarding the location detail on notes (which you could display conditionally based on who is viewing if you've stored the location as a key rather than inserted it as text in the note record), there is no reason why location information is being displayed on the profile page when it is set to friends only in privacy settings. It is completely straightforward to achieve this programmatically - you just conditionally display the Fire Eagle location information in exactly the same way as you conditionally display the regular (static Pownce profile variable) location data.

This is the *second* time Pownce has ignored user privacy (check the history for an entry about birth dates in xml markup) and I'm seriously concerned and yet again pretty offended that as an organisation you see fit to distribute my data in a way I have not permitted. I am even more outraged that a month after this issue was reported, you've done nothing to address it!

I think its about time Pownce ceased to be one of the social networks I'm involved with because making once mistake is fair enough, but repeating it within a few months is completely unacceptable.

Facebook Connect appears to be working quite well on The Insider.com site.

But, it looks like they do need to "approve" every app that links to them that way; good luck with that. – V, on September 23, 2008 17:02

Wouldn't hold your breath, guys ... they've been "working on" RSS integration for about six months and no sign of progress yet, I think they're all busy designing a pretty new logo.

Is the Facebook connect functionality in place yet? If it is, it's not working :(

I spoke too soon when I thought this had fixed the problem earlier.

When I removed facebook app completely, within both facebook and ST, and then re-added it, it did work for a while. It loaded up my friend's status updates from Facebook.

But I've just checked my settings page again and it is now saying "Reauthenticate".

There is a problem here, and someone does need to look at it!

Guys, here's how to get Facebook updates back if they have recently stopped:

You need to remove Facebook from the SocialThing completely, and also log into Facebook, go to apps in the bottom left hand corner, click "edit", then go through all the menu options (particularly "Authorized" and "Additional permissions", but check all of them) and make sure you remove the SocialThing app wherever it is.

Then, come back to SocialThing and add Facebook. You'll get slightly different prompts following the login this time, and you'll have to set your privacy options for the Facebook data again (it defaults to public, and sharing the updates with everyone).

Hope that helps.

Ok, I appear to have found a solution from digging around on this board - its loaded my Facebook data for the first time in days (although I'm not sure yet if it'll ask me to reauthenticate within a few hours!!)

You need to remove Facebook from the SocialThing completely, and also log into Facebook, go to apps in the bottom left hand corner, click "edit", then go through all the menu options (particularly "Authorized" and "Additional permissions", but check all of them) and make sure you remove the SocialThing app wherever it is.

Then, come back to SocialThing and add Facebook. You'll get slightly different prompts following the login this time, and you'll have to set your privacy options for the Facebook data again (it defaults to public, and sharing the updates with everyone).

Its great to see my Facebook data back in ST again, but I'm seriously hacked off that there's been no communication from the ST team themselves about doing this, and that nobody has replied here - I've had to find the solution myself from other users!!

Makes me wonder if I should be recommending ST to anyone. Its a great opportunity for them right now to seize a chunk of the userbase that is frustrated with the Facebook changes, and this is what they do.