John Leyden reports:
Stephen Fry has quit Plaxo after he became annoyed that the social networking site was revealing what he sees as too many personal details with anyone visiting the site – as opposed to designated contacts.
Plaxo, which was co-founded by Napster co-creator Sean Parker, maintains an online address book and social networking service. The service has fully configurable privacy settings, but Fry believes the default settings are sharing rather more information than he’s comfortable with.
In a message on Twitter last Friday, Fry complained that Plaxo was “distributing my details to every casual passerby” and not just his online contacts.
[…]
Plaxo spokesman John McCrea responded that Fry himself had permitted logged-in users to see this information. He denied there was any breach in the security of the service.
“As best I can tell, what’s happened is that one user (albeit a rather prominent one!) was surprised to find that the sharing settings he’d previously applied to some of his personal info were more public than he’d intended,” McCrea told The Guardian.
“We certainly have not made any changes to settings, features or policies that would make anyone’s personal information more widely available than it had previously been.”
Read more in The Register.