CymTyr: Do you not see how this could be an issue? I'm more concerned with other people's protection than my own. You seem to forget how sick most of the people who use the internet are.
No I don't honestly.
And not because I don't understand how sick people can be; you're talking to someone who's spent a lot of her life being abused and bullied.
It's because GOG has literally no information that anyone could do much of anything with even if they had malicious intent. There's no real world identifying information whatsoever. And your gaming history just is not anything anyone is going to care much about; making fun of you because you play [random game here] for [x hours] is idiot schoolyard teasing
at worst and a complete not a thing that will actually happen at best.
So when I read stuff like "may soon be interested in pics of my crotch and bottoms as well" I have to roll my eyes because it's literally nothing but ridiculous hysteria and hyperbole. There's no sane or rational or reasonable concerns or discourse being offered here.
I mean, I'm perfectly proud to be a gamer; it's not something I've ever hidden in the first place, so I don't see why I should be upset that something can see that, like, I play games. And someone making fun of me because of the games I play would elicit an eyeroll at most because quite frankly I've had far, far worse things flung at me in my life and someone who has to resort to that lame a thing isn't even trying.
Likewise, anyone who wants to know what forum threads you post in can already easily do that just by using Google, so removing profiles doesn't protect against that either.
I mean, the deep irony is that it's probably BECAUSE I've had so much experience being bullied and abused that is why I can recognize what is and isn't actually a legitimate thing to worry about. I only wish I had a life so blessed that someone finding out that le gasp I own games and play them sometimes, is the absolute worst thing I can imagine happening to me. Or that it's even a "worst" thing at all versus a total not-a-thing or a positive thing I can use to spark convos with friends.
xyem: Fair enough. The original article I read about it said that the attack makes the browser authenticate into Facebook (outside of user instruction), but you're right, it isn't mentioned in the one that I linked.
Indeed, but the nature of the handshake means that your password can never be exposed regardless of how its intercepted; that's one of the appeals of the FB login or similar logins (like on Twitter or Google) in the first place.
Likewise, reading the article indicates that the security issue was on the end of the website, not on FB's end. So a site that's insecure enough to have its FB login hijacked is insecure enough to have its own data hijacked, meaning a direct login wouldn't save you much.
That's why I keep saying things like "privacy options are a bandaid", "the genie is out of the bottle", "we may have to rethink privacy", etc. Not because I actually like or approve of the situation, but because that's the way the reality is, and it may not be possible to fix it in a bulletproof way.
The web was designed from day one to be a method of sharing data without interruption, so a lot of privacy options are essentially trying to put a padlock on a tissue paper house. It very likely is not possible to completely fix all privacy issues without essentially tearing down the web and starting over with new infrastructure.
In turn, railing at FB or GOG is a bit like spending all your effort on removing a single knife while being surrounded by an infinite number of other knives. So it's not that you don't need to ever protect against the knives, it's that it's going to take more than just a piecemeal, myopic approach and may also require sometimes having to choose which knives are worth protecting against and which ones to put up with scratching you.