Privacy Warning
I had two bad run-in’s with two different websites and their privacy controls yesterday. What’s worse, these sites and their companies have been engaging in a privacy war over the past 9 months with each trying to outdo the other in proving their privacy bona fides. Without revealing too much detail, here were the culprits:
Despite highly touting their new privacy controls, I logged in to one my admin profiles yesterday. This particular profile was set up as a back-end/admin profile for campaign aids to log-in with so they can update various candidate and campaign pages and groups. I set ALL the privacy controls to leave the profile unseen and unsearchable.
The result: the mask profile had over 700 friends. The profile had even been tagged in photo’s. Facebook privacy fail.
YouTube
A candidate video was uploaded to YouTube on Thursday evening. After it was viewed by various groups, the decision was made to pull the video down for futher editing. YouTube has a feature that allows the video to be classified as ‘private’, which they describe as being unsearchable and only viewable with a link sent by the account admin.
The result: I received phone calls from two states saying the video was still showing up in search. They didn’t specify if the search was a Google Video or YouTube search. I didn’t ask. YouTube privacy fail.
