A little buzz has been stirring this past week originating from a post on consultant Cheryl Smith’s blog describing how her husband [Peter Smith] received a dating advertisement through Facebook displaying her photo along with the text, “Hey Peter, Hot singles are waiting for you!”
Facebook allows third-party advertisers to use your pictures and “relevant social actions” within advertisements targeted towards your friends.
“Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends.”
If you want to avoid dating your husband or force your friends to view boring generic advertisements then you can change this setting by navigating to…
Settings > Privacy Settings > News Feed and Wall > Facebook Ads
Change to…
Appearance in Facebook Ads [No one]
For now I’ve decided to keep my setting on [Only my friends] because I enjoy being a cheap poster boy for unscrupulous Facebook apps.
Twitter users frequently share their thoughts in 140 characters or less, and sometimes do not think twice before posting. No worries though, the handy delete button is always available to remove remorseful tweets. Up until now most users were under the impression that deleted posts were swallowed by the black hole of cyberspace, never to be seen again. Tweleted has arrived to let us know this is simply not the case. Tweleted is an application that allows you to search by Twitter username to see what posts have been recently deleted.
The concept behind Tweleted is actually pretty simple due to what can be considered a loophole in the software design of Twitter. When you click delete that post is removed from your profile but still remains available via Twitter search. Tweleted simply compares Twitter search results for your username to the information displayed on your profile and returns only the tweets that do not match up.
Depending on your mood Tweleted offers Good and Evil modes. The default Good mode allows you to easily recover accidentally deleted posts. Evil mode promotes itself as an “instant drama generator” where you can search for embarrassing deleted tweets for fun and profit. John Mayer recently posted that “Wearing corduroy pants means having a nail file on you all the time,” however he apparently changed his mind shortly after.
The loophole has raised privacy concerns and sources say Twitter is working to correct this issue. For now setting your profile to private is a temporary fix if you have recently tweeted and deleted some dirty laundry.
