another day, another bugbear: Frienditto

[topaz]

Ho, hum, look Mabel, there's a new Great Satan of the Internet: Frienditto!

Today's drama is that Frienditto bills itself as an "archiving service": you give it the URL of a LiveJournal post, and Frienditto archives it on their system (which looks and feels a lot like LiveJournal itself). If the post is friends-locked, you can still archive it if you give them your LJ username and password. I'm not sure why anyone would want to do such a thing, but charcoal a son goat and all that.

In the last day or so a lot of people have been saying things like, "If you use Frienditto, please remove me from your friends list." Which, IMNSHO, is not a particularly useful response.

Because, as far as I can tell from looking at it:

Frienditto does not archive everything it sees. It archives specific posts that you name for it. Giving it your LJ username and password does not cause it to suck in everything it can find on your friends list. In order for something from your journal to be archived there, someone would have to give the URL for that specific post to Frienditto, along with their LJ authentication info.

Sure, once someone gives them their LJ username and password, it's theoretically possible that they could do these things. With a username and password they can do anything, up to and including deleting the owner's entire journal and posting a CraigsList personal ad with their contact information. But I don't believe that they are doing either of these things.

And:

If someone takes you off their friends list, it doesn't protect you. As long as they are still on your friends list, they can still access your protected entries and archive them any way they want.

Protecting yourself from Frienditto or similar services is as simple as taking these steps:

1. Post this comment: "Please don't use Frienditto or any other service to archive posts from my journal. You're welcome to archive your own journal this way, but please keep mine out of it."
2. Go through your friends list. Is there anyone there who you do not think you can trust to honor this request? Remove them.

This bid for a lower-drama LiveJournal has been brought to you by topaz_munro.

Comments

[huaman.livejournal.com]

And I still say... if you don't want to run the risk of someone archiving it and it coming back to haunt you years later, don't write it down, and DEFINITELY don't put it online, period. Said that about dang ol' USENET, too, I did.

[pinkfish.livejournal.com]

To quota a famous usenet personality I once knew -


"No!"


I don't know why I felt that was appropriate, I just did.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

This bid for a lower-drama LiveJournal has been brought to you by topaz_munro.

Isn't 'lower-drama LiveJournal' sort of like 'lower-flavor beer'?

[opadit.livejournal.com]

I'm of two minds. One, that the concept sure is rotten and it's too bad that there's a risk that something I've friends-locked will get around to the person I was talking or complaining about.

But the other part of me thinks, well, it's so unlikely that someone would care about me in particular, and that risk of something getting out is so very, very tiny. I mean, everybody and his Internet dog has a blog, and the big secret is: NO ONE READS THEM. Not even your closest friends and family. And you know what? Even if two hundred or two thousand people read your blog, do you really think that makes for a real audience? People seem to think that their blogs are much more influential than a scrap of paper blowing down the street, but they're even less so.

Anyway, there are at least two topics I never post about, one of which is drug use and the other I won't mention even obliquely, except in deep, personal conversations with only the closest of friends. Putting that kind of stuff online is just plain foolish.

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

You are correct that I must do the removing to protect myself.

I'm not so sure I agree, though, that the scope of fd penetration is limited to a single, user-provided url.

[queenmomcat.livejournal.com]

I confess I do rather fall in huaman's camp: don'tput it online if you mind all that much someone finding out about it!

...but also, you're right: for heaven's sake, don't friend anyone who might do such a thing.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I could be wrong. I didn't experiment to find out for sure. It would be possible to test it by creating a group of dummy accounts friended with one another.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. There's no guarantee the security setting will always work anyhow, or that some friend's account won't get shared around (on purpose or by accident), or any of a number of things that could get the friends-only journal archived elsewhere. Ditto for related issues affecting one's private posts.

Everybody's got something to hide (except for me and my monkey, of course).

[mr-privacy.livejournal.com]

There's no guarantee the security setting will always work anyhow

Sure there is! LiveJournal offers you your money back, but only on the free accounts.

[tfarrell.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that no one has pointed out yet that using Frenditto without obtaining the original author's permission in advance is, in fact, illegal.

I wonder what federal department might be convinced to take an unpleaseantly close interest in them?

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Honestly I'd rather the federal government not take an unpleasantly close look at anything LJ related.

Anyway, I think you'd be hard-pressed to make a case that someone making an online copy for personal use of someone else's written and publically posted writing is very illegal. (I assuming the copyright argument is what you were getting at here.) Now if frienditto were posting it so as to be publically available, sure; but a private copy? Nahhh. Then it would be illegal for me to, say, download this entry onto my computer so I could read it later. Good luck with that.

[points.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, the whole thing ended up being a scam to get people's accounts and passwords... I believe the site is now down.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Do you mean copyright infringement? The answer is "none." Copyright is a civil matter, not criminal. The federal government does not take a particular interest in it. Anyone whose work has been appropriated by Frienditto could try to sue them for damages. It would not get very far.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Post this comment: "Please don't use Frienditto or any other service to archive posts from my journal. You're welcome to archive your own journal this way, but please keep mine out of it."

I would never even implicity suggest that anyone reading my journal should use a non-LJ service that might ask them for their LJ username and password.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Good point, I wouldn't want people to read that as an endorsement of the service.

That evil little part of me was thinking that it really would be neat if someone set up an LJ "service" that actually subscribed you to a whole bunch of highly antisocial LJ communities and screwed up your friends list. It might start making people think twice about handing out their passwords.

[lcohen]

i'm shocked. also stunned. also not really surprised at all.