HANGAR

The Facebook privacy debate has gone on for a while now, but something just happened that drew my attention to it again.

As reported on CNET video dating site SpeedDate.com has just purchased the rights to the Oregon Trail Facebook application, an old western pioneering type game with wagons and saloons, nothing to do with dating. They are planning to replace it with a Video Dating application.

This basically means that SpeedDate.com now has access all Oregon Trail registered users’ Facebook data (except for their contact information) as well as their friend’s data. (As stated in Facebook’s Platform terms) The net result being SpeedDate.com gets a few thousand new users, and royally pisses off the rest.

I don’t know about you but this doesn’t seem right to me. When I sign up and agree to an application having access to my data and friend’s data that I can see, I’m making that judgment on the state of that application at the time of signing up.

So the question is, where do we draw the line? Developer’s are making improvements to their applications all the time releasing new versions, which is great as the consumer ends up with a better product. If Facebook allow for users to re-agree whenever an update is made to the application, it would create a roadblock for budding developers aswell as a whole lot of annoyance for users. So how do we measure the differences or deltas in application updates?

Another argument would be that when we put our information online we do it at a risk and shouldn’t be surprised if it is available to companies that want to use it. I mean we get to use Facebook for free, maybe this is the price to pay, it’s the model thats worked for almost every free to air medium so far. We get to use a service in exchange for being marketed towards.

I guess one of the things we need to realise is that once you put something out there whether it be a video posted to vimeo, photo on flickr, comment on facebook, or a digg or tweet, it will always be out there, even 10 years from now when you’ve completely forgotten about it, it’ll be out there sitting in multiple copies across several servers in a farm somewhere.

Anyhoo I’m rambling now.

What do you guys think about this? Is it a matter of concern? or would the majority of users not really care?

You can read the original article on CNET - Oregon Trail Facebook app to be replaced with dating service