Photo-Humiliation Site Sparks Facebook Fury

Said reporter posing as girl harassed by men

(NEWSER) - Posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook, a Daily Mail reporter was bombarded by messages from 20- to 40-year-old men wanting "to perform a sex act"—only it was really another social networking site, and Facebook is livid and threatening to sue over the misreported story . The author of the item, which appeared yesterday, said he was on another site and that editors added the mention against his wishes. Fine, says Facebook, but the paper was slow to respond and the damage is done. More»

(NEWSER) - Facebook is starting a pilot program to test a more user-friendly version of its sprawling privacy controls, CNET reports. The 40 different settings now occupy six separate pages, and are so complicated that many users ignore them completely. “These can add up and pile up and not be as clean as one would like," Facebook’s chief privacy officer said today. So-called “transition tolls” will aid users in the switch. More»

ConnectU suing Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their code

(NEWSER) - The former Harvard friends who unsuccessfully sued Facebook's founder two years ago for stealing their idea are trying again. They filed another suit in Massachusets federal court earlier this year; yesterday the judge said he'll rule in two weeks on whether to dismiss it. More»

Site is all about sharing, so stop expecting a 'silver bullet' fix: Farhad Manjoo

(NEWSER) - Facebook is submitting to a government crackdown on privacy, and Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges “a bunch of mistakes” on that front. But the site’s privacy issues are as much our own fault as Zuck’s, writes Farhad Manjoo in Slate . The “idea that we can control the audience for anything we post online” is simply “misguided,” he writes. “The entire point of Facebook is to allow us to connect and share stuff.” More»

It agrees to independent audits for 20 years

(AP) - Facebook is settling with the FTC over charges it deceived consumers with its privacy settings to get people to share more personal information than they originally agreed to. The charges go back to at least 2009, when Facebook changed its privacy settings so that information users may have deemed private, such as their list of friends, suddenly became viewable to everyone. "They didn't warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance," the FTC said. More»