I’m a big fan of url/bookmark services like furl.net and del.icio.us. Del.icio.us, especially, has a great user community around it and an API which people have used to make all kinds of additional tools and add-ons. Furl is different for one big reason: it stores all of the HTML of the url you are saving. That means that New York Times articles that are more than 2 months old are available in your Furl archives. That’s a huge feature in my book, because even if a web server goes down, the page you’ve saved is still available.
Recently, however, I was alerted by Pietro Speroni to the nasty nature of furl’s privacy policy and I’m re-evaluating my advocacy and usage of furl.
Conclusions
Furl collects personal information, gives this personal information to online partners for commercial purpose, including your e-mail address. Thus I don’t want to use furl and probably neither do you.
In short: Furl Sucks.
and?? just opt out then! they give you the choice to OPT OUT! and actually, when they changed their policy (2-3 months ago), it showed up on the site when I logged in and I had to revalidate it and I also actually took time to read it and it was not that hard to find info on the opting out and you can partly opt out or fully opt out and I did FULLY opt out and there you go.
I mean those people have to LIVE! they give you a fucking great service and they have to make money and Google ads don t pay so selling data to marketing services pays very very well…
I think that they were fair in the way they did it.
I haveto agree with Paul. What they are doing is what every major web service does. They track you (via coremetrics) in order ot understand how users use the site so that they can make it better. The only difference here is that they use a third party service instead of their own pixels. As for the disclosure to third parties, Pietro misses the point completely. They are not selling your info to third parties. They are sharing necessary info with partners that help enbale the service. Such a partner might be Google (who supplies the ads for example). Pietro’s post is way overblown and naive IMHO.
On top of which, I don’t get the interest in del.icio.us. The interface there sucks ass. Not that furl couldn’t be better as well but it’s an order of magnitude better then del.icio.us
/me looks at gman’s weblog’s interface, looks at del.icio.us interface…
/me scratches head…
/me thinks “pot calling kettle black?”
hehehe
Anyways, the two services are fundamentally and totally different. Not terribly much common between them. Not least of which being that del.icio.us is a non-commercial hobby/side project type of thing (which means Joshua could conceivably pull the plug any day now, but which also means any one of us could recreate our own version of it and try to make money off it…)
Or someone could release a decentralized version, with public private switches and centralized synching for tags and ontologies… cough.
There’s nothing “nasty” going on here. And there is nothing inherantly wrong with people collecting PII. If they disclose what they collect, and how they use it, as they clearly have done, and allow you to opt out, that’s the way things go these days.
I’d ask Pietro why he is singling out FURL. Or is he just naive as Peter suggests?
The only PII that is here is your email address your first and last name are optional at sign up. If you are that freaked out about your email, then you could provide the address of a spam account that you use. It’s not like your credit card, social security number, street address or birthday are required.
What they are doing is no different than hundreds of other sites. And they seem to be doing a thorough job at disclosing their uses of the data.
FURL On, I ssy.