so fed up with all this "93% won't" nonsense!

once again I get an email supporting a good cause but absolutely doing my head in with the emotional blackmail that's added in: 93% of people won't forward this... will you be one of those who... yada yada

if only they didn't include this rubbish, I might have actually read the whole thing, and who knows, I might even have chosen to forward the email. but I'm afraid I get so annoyed when I see these things that I just press Delete.

maybe this is why 93% won't forward it? because 93% are fed up to the back teeth with the amount of emotional blackmail they get from their friends on the email? (not to mention all those facebook status update things.)

how about a slightly more respectful approach? how about emailing and saying: you know, there's this cause which I feel is important, I wonder if you'd like to support it to by forwarding the email to others? I wonder what percentage of people would rise to that...

Privacy problems on Facebook (stop me if you've heard this before...)

and this time, dear readers, we'll focus on photos and tagging.

Facebook very kindly gives us the option to choose privacy settings for each photo album. Nice, I thought. Except that they then totally ignore those settings if someone is tagged in the album.

Here's a live scenario I've got right now. (except that I'll change the names of the people involved, because, unlike a certain mark z, I do care about people's privacy...)

My live news feed tells me about one of my contacts, let's call her Elizabeth Hopkins:

Elizabeth Hopkins was tagged in an album.
It then shows me the photos in which my contact was tagged, and underneath that there is a live link to the album in which she was tagged.

I click on that album and get to see all the photos in that album, as well as any comments (by people I don't know) and the full info about who else was tagged there (again, mostly people I don't know).

Now, the album was posted by someone - let's call her Orla Edwards - who is not a contact of mine, in fact she and I don't even have any contacts in common, and she has set the privacy for this album so that I'm not allowed to see it. How do I know? When viewing this album - which I reached through the notice about my contact Elizabeth being tagged - there's a link at the top which says "Back to Orla Edwards' photos", and guess what happens when I click on that link? I get a message that says:

This content is currently unavailable
The page you requested cannot be displayed at the moment. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page.

Seeing as I've just been viewing this album, my guess is that it's the last option: "you may not have permission to view this page."

So, Facebook, if I do not have permission to view it, why did you just show it to me?

and by the way, just to make double sure that I really do not have permission to view that album, I visited Orla's profile and, no, there are no photos viewable to me.

so, to sum up, what I have found is this: if person A (in my example Orla) posts an album and sets it for friends only, and someone then tags person B (in my example Elizabeth) in that album, each and every contact of B's can see the whole album which person A set for her friends only.

and they call this privacy?