The computer security organization Sophos recently conducted a poll, and found that 60% out of 1,500 respondents, owing to privacy concerns, were considering deleting their profile. It is not clear if this is indicative of a definite fall from grace for the website, but is at least more fuel for their bad news month.
Category: Social Networking
Privacy PodCast
This is an excellent podcast on many aspects of privacy in the modern world. – Enjoy! From the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) Radio National.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2010/2896235.htm
The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook
Adding more fuel to the fire that is feeding facebook’s fall from grace, here is a graphic that demonstrates the evolution of facebook’s privacy settings over time.
The Guardian’s Andrew Brown, who provided the link had this to say:
- “Ten years ago, when the British government proposed to make traffic data available to a wide variety of agencies under the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act, there was an outcry from civil libertarians. Their point was that you hardly need to know what people are saying to each other if you know who they are talking to. And now Facebook knows and makes this information freely available to almost anyone.
This may seem like a bad way to treat customers, but the whole point about Facebook is that users aren’t customers. Anyone who supposes that Facebook’s users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren’t customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not.”
As one of the comments read:
- This is a book that nobody should take at face value.
You’ve got 0 friends
Following May’s post earlier this week, I was more than amused to be pointed towards this South Park episode “You’ve got 0 friends”. Would you believe me if I was to say that I have never watched South Park before? And now I can say that I have watched almost a complete single episode… well nearly to the end before I was pulled away to attend my daughter. However I saw enough to feel the need to share with you.
This episode epitomizes both the cool highs and lows and dilemmas of Facebook. Take a look even if you don’t like South Park, as is the case with myself. Especially all of you with a Facebook profile will find it very funny 🙂
Just to add to all the news about Facebook
As if there is not enough news about the latest facebook changes, I had to write something to contribute to all that noise. This is my $0.02.
For a person who has moved around quite a bit and away from home, facebook is a convenient tool to keep in contact with people who are physically far from where I am. Heck, it made it easier to keep in contact with the friends who live in the same city as I do. My friends though are probably not going to get a whole lot of information about me given my highly paranoid privacy settings. (One may also see this as me being too lazy to fill in all my favourite quotes, movies, music, tv shows, my employer data and where I was educated. So really, there is no data in the first place to be made public.)
When I first read in the WIRED article that what one writes in one’s status update can automatically put one on a certain fan page and viewed by everyone, I got quite upset. But after some digging, I realised that maybe they didn’t get it all right. Status updates are still within one’s privacy control. Unless you allow everyone (and I mean everyone on facebook) to view your status updates, then of course it will appear when anyone (and I mean anyone on facebook) will see your status update when they search for that fan page. It just shows how confusing it can get with every new policy change and takes a while for one, even the tech savvy, to understand the changes. I appreciate facebook’s attempt at making privacy settings more fine-grained but this makes it more complex as well and thus difficult to explain and for people to comprehend.
What I particularly dislike about the policy changes are the default privacy settings and the expanding definition of basic information that is made available to everyone in facebook. It would also help if facebook understood the difference between publishing and making something public within a sphere you created. (See article.) For example, this blog entry is publishing. It differs from having this as a note posted on my facebook page because the privacy setting I would have limited (and controlled) the people who will be able to see post.
Below I highlight two issues that I personally find worrying and perhaps, more difficult to deal with.
(1) I think I have a good grasp on how to control the data that I made public and what is kept to my circle of friends. What is a concern though, is the information that my friends are posting about me on facebook. That is something that I do not control. Everyone perceives privacy differently and mutual agreement / consenus should be required in order for data to be made public. It would be nice to see a function within facebook that requests for permission to post a photo of a friend or even tag a friend. This respects the privacy of all parties involved. And if this is a cumbersome process, perhaps it will make one think twice about what to post online. More are exercising self-censorship as mentioned in this article in the NY Times.
(2) Another concern does not involve so much the social aspect of facebook but applies more to application security. These are the vulnerabilities in web applications that lead to data leakage. Here are some that have been reported in the past by Sophos. The leakage of IP addresses and the security hole in the chat.
So to conclude, nope, I am not going to drop off facebook land any time soon. But I will reconsider if ever become famous. Can’t have any photos of me sent to TMZ. Not that there are any discriminating ones.
Another change of privacy policy by Facebook
From one of Jack’s twitters 🙂
U.S. lawmakers told Facebook on Tuesday they were concerned about changes in its privacy policy that would allow personal information to be viewed by more than friends, and options on other websites that would allow third parties to save information about Facebook users and friends. Read more at the Washington Post.
Digital mortality
I heard an interview on the radio last week about how terminally ill are blogging about their disease and how it’s affecting them. I thought about the post from Karen previously, on digital immortality, and thought that this might have some relevance to that.
There is a pretty brief article on the subject in one of the news papers (there’s also the audio from the radio show, but that’s all in Swedish). The interview was with one relative to a cancer victim who passed away a year ago and with the author of a book (Sabina och draken) about this patients blog and what happens outside of her blog. In the interview they  do mention the fact that some of these blogs are continued after the subject has passed away (as is the case of this patients blog). It also points to the fact that these blogs can be an excellent way of making the subjects life easier if they gain positive followers/readers. On the flip side it would be pretty depressing to write your heart out in your blog and find that no one cares. Or worse, that you’ve managed to attract the worst of the internet…
There’s also a comment on how it migt affect the professional care of a patient, if the nurses and doctors are reading the blog (I would say that it will affect it in some way, but that you cannot be sure how).
Google’s privacy conviction in Italy
I think that this is a bit strong. 3 of Google execs charged concerning the content on their site in Italy even though this content was removed within 24 hours of notification. This brings to mind the question of how third-party providers can be expected to take responsibility for content uploaded by end-users… I believe that so long as the provider acts responsibilly by removing content as soon as notified, that this is the best they can do without creating some manual approval process. After all this content was the bullying of a disabled boy, which is really bad, but how do you identify this as inappropriate content using some sort of filtering technology, just not possible, it is not like pornographic material. I guess if bad language is used that this may work?
The Swedish Media Council criticises Facebook
The Swedish Media Council published a report yesterday where they look at the social networking sites used by kids today (Facebook and Youtube among others).
The study is done from a Swedish perspective, which reflects the sites selected for the study, as well as the basis for what criteria should used for the study to some extent (they base part of the criteria on the Swedish law Law on responsibility for electronic billboards (1998:112), also known as the BBS-law).
They mainly look at how safe the site is from a user (kids) perspective. Safety here focuses on handling of user information, how user reports/issues are handled, conditions for membership and  how easy it is to get information on, and in contact with the people running the site.
Unfortunately, the report does not go into all the details on the data they should have gathered in their research. Still an interesting read, and it should provide a good guide for parents looking out for their kids online.
The report is available as a download here. In Swedish only as far as I can tell.