beware of SlideShare
Oct. 6th, 2012 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI followed a link to a rather cool slideshow on SlideShare recently. Knowing how labile content is on the net I wanted to download it for my future reading and to show to friends. In order to download the slideshow I needed to verify my identity with facebook, which was a little annoying, but I thought, what the heck...
Now my interest in looking at further stuff on SlideShare has turned to pure annoyance. I find that I'm being sent unrequested emails from them, and not only that, they've created an account for me on SlideShare and populated it with a whole lot of my personal info from facebook. If this was not annoying enough, deleting my account took me a surprising amount of time. I looked through my settings fairly carefully, but missed the little link at the bottom of a page. I had to do a search for the information. It required entering the account's password, which I don't recall ever setting, so needed to request it then enter the link from an email sent me which took me to a page where I could change the password, so that I could delete the account. I think the password was simply to discourage people from closing their account because this was on a page where I was already logged in (I'd clicked on a link to stop receiving emails in an email they sent me). I could change all my other data without use of a password. Clearly it was intended as discouragement.
I'm sure being able to share slideshows online is potentially a great service, but they killed it for me because of their aggressive manner and lack of concern for privacy. I will never visit their site again and I will spread the word to avoid them like the plague. And be very careful of anything that wants to verify your ID using facebook. This is just about enough to get me to close my facebook account. I dislike facebook intensely. This adds to that antipathy. If it wasn't for a few people who don't use any other contact means I would close it. The monsters who operate facebook have made it almost impossible to do, but that just makes me feel even more like doing so.
Now my interest in looking at further stuff on SlideShare has turned to pure annoyance. I find that I'm being sent unrequested emails from them, and not only that, they've created an account for me on SlideShare and populated it with a whole lot of my personal info from facebook. If this was not annoying enough, deleting my account took me a surprising amount of time. I looked through my settings fairly carefully, but missed the little link at the bottom of a page. I had to do a search for the information. It required entering the account's password, which I don't recall ever setting, so needed to request it then enter the link from an email sent me which took me to a page where I could change the password, so that I could delete the account. I think the password was simply to discourage people from closing their account because this was on a page where I was already logged in (I'd clicked on a link to stop receiving emails in an email they sent me). I could change all my other data without use of a password. Clearly it was intended as discouragement.
I'm sure being able to share slideshows online is potentially a great service, but they killed it for me because of their aggressive manner and lack of concern for privacy. I will never visit their site again and I will spread the word to avoid them like the plague. And be very careful of anything that wants to verify your ID using facebook. This is just about enough to get me to close my facebook account. I dislike facebook intensely. This adds to that antipathy. If it wasn't for a few people who don't use any other contact means I would close it. The monsters who operate facebook have made it almost impossible to do, but that just makes me feel even more like doing so.