No matter how strictly you control your Facebook Privacy Settings, it appears that private information about your life can still slip through the cracks and be seen by people who you’d rather weren’t aware of certain facts. This is exactly what happened to two young people in Texas when their inclusion in a Facebook Group outed them as homosexuals to their respective parents.

Last year Bobbi Duncan was trying to hide the fact that she is a lesbian from her father. But when the president of the Queer Chorus – a choir group she had recently joined – added her to the choir’s Facebook Group, a notification was sent to her 200 friends, including her father. The very same evening Ms Duncan’s father left all manner of messages and threats on her phone, making the situation very problematic indeed.

Another student at the University of Texas – Taylor McCormick – had been added to the Queer Chorus Facebook Group at the same time as Bobbi. As a result, Taylor was outed to his Facebook Friends and family members as being gay. Despite the fact that both Bobbi and Taylor were sophisticated Facebook users who had taken many steps to control their Privacy Settings so that any clues to their sexual orientation were hidden from their parents, this information was still publicised.

Commenting on this story, Jason Calacanis had this to say:

“This is the price that consumers are paying for Facebook’s horrible, horrible track record and attitude around privacy. We did blog post after blog post about how stupid it was to allow your friends to add you to a group, and Facebook ignored them. Letting others tag you and autoposting those photos to your feed is another example of Facebook’s very immature and self-centered approach to our privacy… I really think that all of these seemingly little mistakes are going to be Facebook’s downfall.”

It’s easy to point at Facebook and its “post first, ask questions later” approach to your personal information, but whichever way you slice it, Facebook is a free, public network that makes its money from your data. It’s only a matter of time before your ‘private’ data becomes less private.

In the case of the Queer Chorus, it’s an unfortunate situation where the organiser tried to help the members stay up to date with the rehearsal schedule, but two young people were inadvertently outed to their parents. If the choir master had used a private sharing network, this predicament could have been easily avoided. Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing, but at least people can learn from the previous mistakes of others.

FileSonic has become the latest online file storage site to be taken offline as a result of the ongoing war against piracy. The service was one of the most popular file-sharing sites, however since the Megaupload arrests in January, the ability of members to access other users’ uploads has been restricted.

Along with FileSonic, another file-sharing site – Oron – has been closed down. Both sites are being sued by Miami-based pornography company Flava Works, who accuse the two services of profiting from piracy, among other allegations.

FileSonic was one of the power players in terms of cloud storage and file-sharing, ranking among the top 10 most visited services of its kind. But it seems that a significant proportion of the usage was of an illegal nature, with Google’s transparency report revealing that the search company had received over 150,000 requests to remove links to allegedly pirated material since May 2011.

A notice on FileSonic’s homepage explained what users could and couldn’t do: ”All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.”

While users can still access their own data, anyone who relied upon the service for sharing their own documents with friends, family, colleagues or clients will have been left looking for another way to share files. DADapp allows users to create their own private sharing network, enabling them to privately and securely share photos, music, videos and files.

To start using DADapp today, download our private sharing software and invite your friends to your network. It works between PCs and Macs and is a truly private way to share files.

The dangers of storing too much of our personal information and data in the cloud have been underlined in the last week after a US tech journalist was the victim of an attack by hackers that saw him lose a substantial amount of data.

Mat Honan – a writer for Gizmodo – first became aware of the attack when his iPhone appeared to have crashed. When he tried to restore it by connecting it to his MacBook Air, his laptop asked him for a PIN – something he has never set up on that device. Upon picking up his iPad he discovered the same issue, finding that it had also been reset.

To make matters worse, when he tried to login to his Gmail account on his wife’s laptop, it became clear that the password for this has also been changed, and the backup sent to his iCloud account – which he could no longer access. In addition this meant that his Twitter account had been compromised, and in turn so had the Twitter account of Gizmodo, which was linked to his personal feed.

In a bizarre twist of events, Mr Honan found out what had actually happened when one of the attackers – belonging to the hacking group Clan Vv3 – got in touch to tell him how they did it. The journalist has since used his Gizmodo connections to speak with contacts at Apple, Google and Twitter who have helped restore access to his accounts.

So while Mat Honan may have now regained access to his accounts, lots of his data was deleted. This is the risk you run when storing your content in the cloud – if someone can get into one of your accounts, any associated data is in the crosshair almost by default. Derrick Harris from tech site GigaOm said that by signing up for iCloud or similar services, users are giving up control over their digital lives.

If you need to make files available on multiple devices and share data with your friends, family or colleague, there is a safer and more private alternative to cloud hosting. With DADapp you can easily share files privately and securely. It’s more private than Facebook, easier than Windows networking and more flexible than Dropbox. So if you have reservations about the cloud, start using DADapp today.

What you do with your own data is entirely up to you. But if you decide to entrust any of that data to a third-party, you need to be sure that they will take the same care of it that you do. This point won’t be lost on a government department in America, after an outside contractor accidentally published a large number of files that were to be used as evidence in a legal dispute.

The Food and Drug Administration is now investigating how Quality Associates Inc. of Fulton, Md., inadvertently made public 75,000 pages of confidential files about how the agency approved medical devices. The subject matter of the documents relates to a surveillance operation that monitored the email accounts of five agency scientists who had lodged complaints in 2008 about the manner in which new medical devices were being given the go-ahead by the FDA’s medical-device center.

As a result of having their keystrokes logged, personal emails intercepted and documents copied from their personal thumb drives, the scientists under clandestine investigation filed a lawsuit against the FDA. Subsequent document requests were made during that litigation, so the FDA handed the files over to Quality Associates for the purposes of printing materials and making them available to various parties involved in the legal process.

However once Quality Associates were in possession of the files, their storage and security protocols left a lot to be desired as it emerged that the documents in question were available online to the public as recently as May this year.

Whenever we entrust any information to a third-party, we always run the risk of that data being shared further than we would like. Times are tough enough these days with increasingly more technically adept hackers trying to gain access to all manner of encrypted databases, but when a paid contractor leaves confidential legal documents online for anyone to view, you need to rethink how you go about sharing files.

DADapp is a private, secure sharing network. The user2user sharing system means that you can easily share your media on local networks and across the web, only transferring selected files to authorised recipients. Files are shared directly between individual users, so there is no need to store any of your private data in the cloud.

To find out more and to start using DADapp to privately share files, visit DADapp.com where you can download DADapp for PC or Mac. Share with your own world, not the whole world.