A few weeks back I wrote about love scams (“You Give Love a Bad Name,” WSJ.com) — how scammers are trawling online dating sites looking for suckers. What interested me about the scam is that in some cases the scammers play a very patient game — luring the mark in over a period of months… Read More »
We’re probably being too kind to Facebook, and, in particular, to the third party applications that plug into it. They’re abusing user trust and committing sins we castigate others for, so we should be consistent: Many Facebook applications are spam. Take this one, for example, illustrated above. It’s called ATTACK! and upon accepting an invitation… Read More »
This week’s WSJ.com column (subscription only, I’m afraid) is about Jiglu, a sort of automatic tagging service you can see in action somewhere on this blog: If you’re a writer, you hope your words will be etched in stone for eternity. If you’re a blogger, you’re happy if someone stumbles on your writings a few… Read More »
Jaiku, the presence, Twitter-like-but-better tool, has been bought by Google. Great news, I would have thought. But then I thought again. Google? The guys who already know too much about me? With access to all my stream of consciousness? Knowing where I am? So I checked out the Jaiku Privacy Policy. What data would/might Google… Read More »
Before Facebook, we had to find our friends on FriendsReunited, a very successful UK site that achieved critical mass but had one flaw: users had to pay to communicate with each other. It only struck me now that there’s something a little unethical about that. Take, for example, what just happened to me: someone… Read More »