Is your online privacy safe with Pinterest?

By accessing your personal info when you set up your profile through Facebook, is the hot, new site breaching what has become online privacy protocol?

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I can’t get my sister-in-law to interact with me on Facebook, but she loves Pinterest and had been trying to get me to use it for a couple of months. Given the recent chatter on social media, I finally broke down and joined it, using my Facebook account to establish my Pinterest profile.

I then noticed that I was receiving emails that so-and-so was now following me on Pinterest. At first I thought, wow, I’m super popular. Then reality set in, and I decided to see what was up. In a quick call to my sister-in-law, I found out that she had received an email saying I was now following her on Pinterest, so she followed me back. My reaction? I never asked to follow you. I didn’t ask to follow anybody.

It turns out that when I used my Facebook account to create my profile, Pinterest accessed my personal information to automatically have me start following common connections. In my book, Pinterest broke a basic tenet of online privacy: to not invasively use my online information.

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