Internet: Facebook's latest offer - still a trojan horse

The "like" function in Facebook is a disaster. Users are forced to either accept third party feeds or to not tell their contacts, "friends" in Facebook-ese, what they are interested in. But there is absolutely no warning that updating a list of interests will result in this force feeding.

The function guesses at what the user will be interested in and serves up pages of third party stuff into their pages.

Worse, the public profile is pre-set information. So in the case of one person whose profile we looked at it displayed, by reason of the "store" information it produced, an insight into the mind of a very upset young woman. It also listed her likes and dislikes in TV and music: exactly the sort of information a stalker or even a predator would be interested in.

The public profile automatically displays information as to some of the user's "friends." It is not at all easy to find out whether it is possible for one's information to be kept private from this kind of public display.

Indeed, it's an all or nothing public profile, so far as we were able to find out: using the profile of one of our own team, we tried to limit the information on the public profile page which is available to all who have the information as to the identity (username) of any person: exactly the information that is available next to the photos of "friends" in the profile.

Zuckerberg says that Facebook will be making changes - in some cases to make it easier to switch off the things that people do not want to display. But the latest comments from users suggest that this will be more difficult as applications and other features will need to have these things turned off individually and will not be subject to global settings.

But surely Zuckerberg has missed again: is the whole point of user control of data that users should control what is released, not what is not released. The default settings should be private - as in PRIVATE - and opened up only by the express actions of the users.