Facebook glitch brings new privacy worries


A major security flaw in Facebook’s privacy settings has heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information, the New York Times reports. On May 5, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether. Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information. “Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md. Facebook is increasingly finding itself at the center of a tense discussion over privacy and how personal data is used by the web sites that collect it, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University. “It’s clear that we keep discovering new boundaries of privacy that are possible to push and just as quickly breached,” Katz said…

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