Richard Allan from Facebook about safety

Today in Luxembourg the question "No privacy online anymore?" was in the air. In the evening before European Data Protection Day Mr Richard Allan, director of Policy EU of Facebook arrived to the special conference to the capital. As Facebook is a social phenomenon and even the "hero" of the film ("The social network"), Allan was hosted here like a star in the glare of publicity. Of course he was surrounded by excited luxembourgish cameramen and of course the audience bombarded him with detailed questions.

After listening to him for 2 hours I can say that he's a nice guy with a strong sense of humour. Here's one of the introductory slides of his presentation:

It's reference to the adage "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" from the cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993 (by the way the most reproduced cartoon from this journal ever). Even though Facebook's creator, Mark Zuckerberg, anounced some time ago that "the age of privacy is over", his colleague Richard Allan believes in selective privacy.

He talked about the personal management of different privacy levels for Facebook accounts, about options "Deactivate (hibernation), Delete, Memorise (for the families of facebook users who have gone)" and subject acces reaquests as well as cooperation of Facebook and DeleteMe.

The discussion had hot moments ;) (hmm, did I hear it right?)

Everything was nice till the moment when Allan got werbally attacked by one of the guys from the audience that reproached him for talking about preventing hacking instead of preparing the strategy of solving possible (sorry, "sure" according to him) large-scale attack. People are so serious about fb - imagine that this inquirer was afraid of his social security number kept in his profile :) Well, you don't have to be security expert to know that it's not a good place to stock this kind of data...

To give you some practical guidelines I will use this photo from the booklet for young luxembourgish internet surfers (by Bee-secure) that is aimed to warn them from revealing too much on Facebook. The authors suggest that beeing to honest "is not supposed to help youngsters at school or when looking for summer job"...

(Explanation for English-speaking lecturers: Sandra de Stroy 666 from Bertrange hates everything, especially one of the holidays.)

To finish with, you can take a security quizz if you want to (be more secure)...