Facebook hijacked my Facebook page

Today I tried to login to Facebook only to find my page covered with a message from Facebook that made a very serious attempt to force me to add information THAT IT CHOSE to my profile.  There have been some terrible rumors about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding his ethical values, and his attempts to violate user privacy, and maybe that is what we are seeing manifested in his unrestrained attempts to foist his virtual imperial will on unsuspecting users.  I am a power web user, and it took me some time to figure out how to defeat this dishonest ploy.  Many social network users would just accept it in order to maintain relationships with family and friends.  The only thing missing was a message from the mob saying, "If you want to communicate with your family again, you will do as I say.  Hand over your personal information!" 

Anyone esle ready for a new social networking platform?

CEO of Spoke.com Replies

Philippe Cases, CEO of Spoke.com commented on your post "Wow! Serious Invasion of Privacy":

Hi Paul, my name is Philippe Cases and I am the CEO of Spoke. Spoke is a contact management on steroids so what we do is the following:

1) Upload all your contacts safely in our cloud services including contacts that you have in your email system and not in your address book. By doing this, you will end up with a “Spokebook” of anywhere between 500 to thousands of people of which typically 20% are in your address book and altogether 30% are current;

2) Because you may not remember the person, in the cloud, we are providing you a profile of the person and the context of which you exchanged information (hence the subject line and first 256 characters of your email message) in order to remind of how you connected with the person;

3) One last thing we do is keeping track with the person so that if the person changes job, you are alerted.

Our privacy policy is built to enable to do what I am describing above in term of product and nothing else.

We are serious about our privacy policy to the point that we have written one and that we are being overseen by Truste. Changing our privacy policy would require us alerting our user base and let them that this is happening. The users would then have to decide what to do, either leave the site altogether with their data or stay if they feel comfortable with the privacy changes.

I hope this helps

Wow! Serious Invasion of Privacy

Spoke.com seemed like a good idea to me...until I read the fine print!  I won't say it is a scam, but it sure smells like one.  The fine print says that Spoke:

"may collect Your Submitted Information from your e-mail client (in conformance with privacy preferences you select) and transmit that data to Spoke’s database server for use in the Service, including the Spoke network and your personal “SpokeBook”. Depending on the privacy preferences you select, Your Submitted Information may include, among other things: (a) your address book or contact entries, (b) the header (including “To” and “From” information) and signature information from your e-mail messages, and (c) if you authorize, the subject lines and first 256 characters of your e-mail messages. Your Submitted Information will be indexed and analyzed in order to identify your contacts and to estimate the strength of your relationships with them. The strength of your relationships is determined by, among other things, how often you e-mail, and receive e-mails from, your contacts. Spoke also collects and accesses information concerning your selected privacy preferences to establish and deliver the Service to you."

In other words, "We only want your entire contact list.  Oh' and the subject line and content of your emails!" Wow! 

 I quoted it verbatim so as not to mislead.  Note that they do offer certain user controls. But they would be more trustworthy than Facebook.  I mean, they would try to sneak in a little change here and there when you were offline.  Would they?

What's your take on this?  

Oh, I almost forgot my FCC disclaimer:  Spoke.com did not send me a bicycle, or any money, or even a free 10 day trial, during which they could upload my entire address book and monitor my email content.