MENLO PARK, CA—The Internet hacking collective known as “Anonymous,” responsible for multiple past attacks on such prominent targets as Visa and the Church of Scientology, announced today that their most recent hack, on social networking giant Facebook, redesigned Facebook’s privacy controls to make them usable by actual human beings.
“The Anonymous Collective has taken this action to strike a blow for Internet freedom, democracy, and a user interface that someone other than a C++/PHP programmer can operate,” read a statement posted on their website Saturday evening. “Frankly, although we were able to compromise Facebook’s robust security and penetrate their firewall, prior to this attack most of us still had no idea how to tag a photo so that our mothers couldn’t view it.”
Facebook officials were quick to rebut Anonymous’ claims: “Despite assertions to the contrary, Facebook’s privacy controls remain as indecipherable to the average user as ever. Our engineers are working around the clock to ensure that our users’ personal data can be exploited and monetized by our corporate advertisers without their understanding what in God’s name is going on.”
As of Sunday morning, however, Facebook users reportedly were able to quickly and easily select what information they wished to share and with whom. Early reports also indicated that data tagged as private also stayed private, at least for the time being. In fact, it appeared that Anonymous had also been able to turn off default sharing with “everybody”, effectively urging users to pick and choose which posts about their STD status or photos of drunk friends to make public.
“This is way overdue,” said Facebook user Sasha Trolla, 27. “I mean seriously, I’m sick of seeing ads for ‘educational grants available to single moms’ on my profile just because I once posted a photo of my sister’s baby, and no, I don’t want to ‘friend’ Alexia from HR just because I emailed her once from my Gmail account.”
“Or look at her beer pong pictures. Lock that shit down for Christsakes."
Cross-posted at The Smew
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