Mr. Barman, Thank you for taking the time to provide your comment. I spend a great deal of time informing my friends and family in much the same manner.

Throughout the years, I have read and studied every incident and issue you mention extensively and stand by what I have stated.

Much of what you describe is not limited to Facebook but rather these are concerns across the internet. In fact, with such worldwide daily scrutiny of Facebook, I think we know exactly what occurs with it, while we may not have the complete story regarding other websites. The underground world is up to no good every day and doesn’t limit itself to Facebook. As you state, you don’t want to scare people away from using the internet. However people need to keep informed. Many, many sites use cookies. You can save guard your system. Laws may change to keep up with many of these issues. People will continue to post their opinions and beliefs across many websites and any person can read them when they have the freedom to do so.

As I stated, I don’t have much personal information on Facebook. I also don’t play games and limit the use of applications on Facebook. You are warned before you use a game or application that they will have access to your data. If you proceed, you do so with full knowledge of what will occur. People who choose to do so, even my IT professional friend, feel the benefits outweigh disclosing the information. In my case, they don’t get much and none of it is of use to someone trying to steal my identity. As I’ve stated all along, Facebook is what you make it. I keep my account safe.

Sadly cyberbullying is a concern in many, many forms. Again, a problem which exists across the internet on social networking sites and not just related to Facebook. For me, I’ve dealt with it in a comment on a post and in emails spread across the City, but not on Facebook. I’m completely aware that the possibility exists and you can report abusive profiles.

Friends have told me Facebook is blocked at work but these instances are not completely related to security issues. Hopefully they will be able to keep up with their phones and at home.

For those willing to head out into Facebook for our adventure, thank you for coming along. We’ve already see more interaction and continue to look forward to building community in a new way.

Also, I take some umbrage with the idea that your reporting on the Mayor and Council meetings were “repetitive”. They were uniquely and well-written summaries from the perspective of a resident, as opposed to the perspective of a newspaper reporter who may not be as familiar or invested with the community. At any rate, I suppose if you’re going to stop reporting on events with the town government I won’t likely read RC anymore. I guess I’ll have to seek out the sources that you think you’ve been repeating, then.

Good luck to you both!

Facebook knows everything about you and, even though they have privacy settings, does sell that information to advertisers. They have come up with ways to aggregate your data that makes it easy for advertisers and others to find out things about you that you may not want publicly disclosed. Although those advertisers are supposed to follow Facebook’s policies on the usage of private data, there have been abuses and Facebook has been reluctant to close those loopholes. One of those abuses are the games, like the popular Farmville, that takes your private information from Facebook, the company aggregates them, and sells the information to third parties.

Although Facebook has tried to increase the privacy, most of the attempts have failed in one form or another. So they keep trying and keep failing to put into place the privacy that is needed.

There is no verification of accounts. Someone can make up an account pretending to be you and create a profile that says more than you will ever want published or create false information. These types of accounts have been used to harass people, extort money, and has been used for cyber bullying. There was the case of the mother cyber bullying a teen rival of her daughter. The rival later committed suicide. The mother was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was being stalked using his own website and had to take out a restraining order on that person.

Facebook and other data mining was used against Justice Antonin Scalia. Students at Fordham Law School taking a class on information privacy law created a dossier about Justice Scalia after he wrote a majority opinion against the privacy rights some think are necessary. The dossier was presented to Justice Scalia at a conference. He was not happy.

There is an ongoing “discussion” in Canada by their equivalent of our Attorney General and Facebook over Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act. In Canada, it is illegal to release the names of minors who were murdered and those accused until indictments are handed down. Facebook is used to create “tribute pages” that allow for this violation of the law. Although Facebook has agreed to delete these pages on request, there is a question of international treaties in law enforcement potentially being violated. In the mean time, this type of violation and other violations of laws of other countries do have the potential of forcing a shutdown. Did you know that in some countries like Canada and Germany, Holocaust denial is illegal? Germany has not been pleased with Facebook for allowing this stuff on their site–or minimally, allowing it to propagate into Germany.

The European Union continues to investigate Facebook for violations of the EU’s privacy laws. The key difference between the way the privacy laws work in the EU versus the US is that the European model is for the user to opt-in. In the US, the primary model is to opt-out. The EU has threatened lawsuits against Facebook and reports claim that they may file a suite in the World Court at The Hague this year.

You said that in order to register you need to enter First Name, Last Name, email, and birthday. The birthday is the key piece of information. Once I find that, I find your address online (pick a white pages service) and start searching for any piece of information. Have you used your credit card online? There are ways to search the Internet for those sites that do not properly handle credit card numbers that I can use to find your credit card number. I can also find the CVV2 code. Once I have your birthdate and credit card number, I can go to any of a number nefarious services to read your credit report and get any other information I need to create a person to steal your identity.

And if you want to delete an account, you can do so. But Facebook still has traces of you in their system. Because of the way they created the system, you cannot be fully erased from Facebook. This leaves breadcrumbs of information that can be associated with you that can be used against you.

Just visiting the site can also be problematic. Facebook makes heavy use of cookies that can still track you and any third-party site that uses Facebook for advertising or anything else can track you. One of the biggest concerns is something call Local Shared Objects (LSO) that is used by Adobe’s Flash. LSOs are cookie-like files that can store an unlimited about of information where cookies are limited in size. LSOs cannot be deleted when you delete cookies and, unless you use special programs as opposed to the tool on Adobe’s website, LSOs may not be completely deleted from your system. Reading and writing of LSOs are not restricted. Any Flash-based site that can create an LSO can read any LSO. Simply put, if you click on an ad made with Adobe Flash on one site, another site can find out by looking for the LSO. Facebook tools that use Adobe Flash also store information in LSOs that are universally read.

I could go further and scare you off the web, but that is not my purpose here. I wanted to show you that there are real concerns about using Facebook. For the record, I am an information security professional–I do security and privacy for a living for the federal government. As part of my work I have participated in studies for government agencies to show them the danger of social networks, specifically Facebook. I have created research accounts and proceeded to show the agencies how to do some of these things. I am constantly amazed at the information people store on Facebook and the potential for someone to violate their privacy. Studies that my company has done has kept Facebook out of most government agencies to the point that they are blocking the site at the firewall!

Facebook is used as a launching point for thousands of privacy violation a day. Many are benign. Others have real implications for problems. I know there is an underground world that knows this and will use whatever information they can gather. Facebook is one of their starting points (I do ongoing research into what the illegal hackers are doing). Based on my knowledge of Facebook and what some are doing with it, I will never have a profile on the site, regardless of how minimal it is, nor will I ever visit a page on Facebook. To borrow a term: It’s unsafe at any speed!

Could you explain why you think Facebook is a security risk? I’ve had a certified IT professional tell me that he sees no security threat from Facebook.

You don’t need an account to appreciate the exchange of news and opinion on Rockville Central’s Page:

https://www.facebook.com/RockvilleCentral

Yes, if you want to participate and post information to our wall and leave comments, you would need a Facebook account. To set up a Facebook account you only need to give a First Name, Last Name, email, and birthday. I don’t see that as a security risk.

A Journal in Illinois had an editorial this week with all the facts wrong about our move to Facebook. I wanted to respond. In order to leave a comment you had to leave your full name, address, telephone number and email. When I tried to leave out any of the information, I wasn’t allowed to register and couldn’t respond. The Facebook requirements were nothing in comparison. Personally I don’t have very much information on my Facebook profile and I don’t even have my birthday visible.

Sadly I don’t agree with your statements about all the same things being available on Facebook. On Rockville Central news and views have been available without putting personal information security at risk. Sorry, but I’m with those who have already said more articulately that that is not a tradeoff worth making.

The recent analysis by the NGA indicates that losses will continue be realized by the Redgate golf course for the foreseeable future. I don’t see how the residents of Rockville can continue to be asked to carry this deficit when there are far more important services that need support. We are already carrying the massive debt for the Town Center garages which should not have been put on the backs of the taxpayers when other private sector options were available.

I would prefer to discuss those public policy differences. For example, the Advisory Committee’s repeated statement that indirect costs should not be charged to the golf course is inconsistent with generally accepted standards for measuring budgetary cost. Allocating full cost, including indirect expenses, is the Gold Standard in modern budgeting. It’s one of the first lessons learned by students in their first year of public finance. The Government Finance Officers Association lists this as a best practice (Measuring the Cost of Government Service, 2002). We recommend it extensively at the federal level, for example, for determining costs for Federal awards through grants (Office of Management and Budget, Circular A-87) and for calculating user charges (OMB Circular A-25). The full cost allocation report prepared by the Matrix Consulting Group stated the principle very clearly:

“The primary objective of a Full-Cost Allocation Plan is to spread costs from administrative departments, generally called “Central Service Departments” to those departments, divisions, cost centers, and/or funds that receive services from the administration in support of conducting their operations. In doing so, an organization can both better understand its full cost of providing specific services to the community, and also generate organizational awareness regarding indirect (overhead) costs associated with operations.”

Interestingly, the NGA study does not attempt to define away RedGate’s financial difficulties by excluding indirect costs. It deals with the issue head-on, as it should. The study notes that these are costs “that other golf courses (both private and public sector) might consider normal and thus should be included as basic operating expenses.” It further notes that “a comparable non-municipal golf course would have administrative expenses in the $180,000 to $200,000 range per year, inclusive of senior management staff (P & R Director/City Manager).” If we are to be serious about operating the golf course without burdening taxpayers, this is one of the cost drivers that we should be addressing, not following the Advisory Committee’s recommendation to hide the expense in the General Fund.

One more substantive point. The Advisory Committee has promoted the argument that the City would continue to bear these indirect costs if the golf course were closed or a private manager were hired to run it. It’s a specious argument. Next year the cost of indirect services provided to the golf fund is estimated at $335,000. That’s a lot of hours of staff time. Assume for purposes of discussion that all of these services were provided by extremely high paid employees earning $100 per hour, including benefits (total compensation of $208,000). That’s more than 1.5 staff in central administrative positions providing services to the golf course instead of providing services to taxpayers. If we closed the golf course and the number of staff was not reduced, taxpayers would certainly pick up the cost. But at least taxpayers would be getting the benefit of their time and services.

We have been extremely grateful to our advertisers. All of them contacted us after we announced we would accept advertising. We can’t thank them enough. We thought having some income would offset the expenses associated with Rockville Central which has always been a volunteer effort. We also liked the idea of getting the word out to everyone about these wonderful community partners.

We will not receive any revenue from Facebook and have no plans to raise revenue in any other way. When I was interviewed about the move, I mentioned a few times that we had no plans to make money — but I could imagine other revenue streams for news sites. I’ve heard presentations from sites which depend on such things as conferences and workshops to make their income instead of advertising. I believe a Facebook news site could be monetized – but again – we don’t have any plans to do so (even if I am an event planner)!

I know it takes a lot of time and effort to clearly document the many details involved in most real-life situations, and I appreciate that you have taken the time to do so. Your thoughtful explanation is a welcome relief.