360angles

Now when I first used Facebook I used their system of uploading information from my Google Mail address book to find friends. Little did I know (and I would not have expected) that Facebook would retain that information after I’d used it for the purpose that I gave it to them for, and later use it to tell other people about me.

This seems like a problem, although they do list it in the Facebook privacy policy. You can opt out of course, but to do so you’d obviously have to know about it first. Which is indicative of an even larger problem, to me.

Here’s Facebook’s privacy policy as of today at half size:

There’s 350,000,000 people on Facebook, and 600,000 more are signing up every day. How many of them do you think have read that? How many of them know what it opts them (and everyone in their address book) in to?

Sometimes we have to send sensitive information online. Stuff like PIN numbers and passwords that we don’t really want sitting in the recipients email folders forever. So how do we send one of those “This message will self destruct in 5… 4… 3…” notes like in Mission Impossible?

It’s easy with Privnote. Privnote is one of those super-simple “Why didn’t I think of that?” web services. I use it when I need to send info that I don’t want filed away on an email server for the next 50 years. Over the last few months Privnote has earned a permanent bookmark in my browser’s “Web Tools” folder.

If you want to send a Privnote, just go to Privnote.com, type up your message and hit “Create Note”. It will provide you with a secure URL you can mail to whomever you want. The url links to your note, which is will be destroyed after it has been read. It’s fast, simple and helpful. Just a like a good web-app should be. (And it’s free.)