Tag Archives: Privacy

Facebook Exodus Becoming a Raging Torrent

Posted on by Brad Heap

For months if not years now privacy groups have be moaning about Facebook, along with MySpace, Bebo, Buzz, Twitter, and anything and everything else about the internet in general.

However it is rare for the technological blog and news websites to complain. They complained about Buzz and within days Google had changed its policies giving users much more control. However, with Facebook something else is happening, there is a massive turn off in the technology community against Facebook.

On the weekend I removed all my photos, applications and personal information from Facebook. Twitter is no longer linked into it and I am no longer posting status updates. At this moment I have not yet deleted or deactivated my account. But everyday I am getting a little closer to doing so.

Articles complaining about Facebook’s new information selling regime are now stretching across the web, last week wired.com ran a number of pieces about Facebook. Now readwriteweb is running an article on how to completely delete your Facebook account – They also have a screenshot of the emotional blackmail when you try to deactivate.

The torrent is also appearing on Twitter. Nearly every post I see about Facebook is about how to delete or deactivate your account. Check this search on Twitter for an example (edit: search may not work, can’t link to a search on twitter).

I saw a prediction on the weekend that Facebook would be dead within 6 months – dead as in dead like MySpace, alive but on life support. At the rate people are getting angry over these latest changes the exodus of tech people could be complete within the month.

A Few Thoughts on Facebook and Social Networking Privacy

Posted on by Brad Heap

Growing up in the Internet age I accept that I don’t really have any privacy. It is possible for almost anyone to find out almost anything about me. For instance any company that extends a form of credit to me be it a hire purchase, credit card, or even renting a car will be able to find out my finance history through information sharing services such as Veda Advantage. And if I move house or update one piece of information with a government department suddenly the IRD, Electoral Office and almost everyone else knows my knew address and starts sending me angry letters telling me to update my details. I simply couldn’t vanish no matter how hard I tried.

On the internet privacy concerns have existed since its birth. In the past in order to protect peoples identities many users operated behind aliases and screen names. I have had a few the two most prominent being kiwikidbrad and more recently nzv8fan. However, there are two main problems with screen aliases. The first is they can still quite easily lead back to you, for instance kiwikidbrad suggests my real name is Brad, and I am a kiwi, and still reasonably young (okay I started using this name when I was around 10 or 11 years old). When I switched to nzv8fan it was a little less obvious who I was other than I was from NZ and into V8 Supercars, but still over time you slip and sign off a post as Brad or accidentally post from somewhere that lists your real name alongside your screen name. The second problem with aliases is not knowing the true identity of who is behind them. Even though I just said I could be worked out, if I had a phony identity to start with, and then built an online alias on top of that I can become quite a credible fake.

To get around these problems Facebook did something quite radical when it launched. You would not have screen names rather you would use your actual identity. This is both a good and terrible idea. It is a good idea because it means you can rapidly be found my people in your past who may not know you currently and therefore would have a hard time finding out your screen name. It is also a terrible idea because of how easy it makes you to find.

Initially Facebook introduced some good privacy controls around this, firstly anyone accessing any data on Facebook had to be registered on the site, there was no such thing as a public profile. Secondly a lot of your data was hidden to people who were not your friends and only a limited amount was supplied to people so they could identify you as an actual friend and add you. This system worked quite well.

As a result of this openness about identity but strictness in privacy a lot of people flocked to Facebook as it was a genuine site where you could actually trust people, but as people flocked to Facebook it became too popular for its own good. It got greedy and power hungry. As a result of this over the past two or so years the high walls of privacy that protect users on Facebook have come tumbling down. Now in the latest development (see my immediate prior post) Facebook’s desire to connect everyone to everyone else has seen the creation of public pages that connect anyone with any remote common interest that they list. Essentially everything you write on Facebook will be connected. Forget 6 degrees of separation Facebook is aiming for 1.

The next developments in Facebook’s history will be interesting. I am wondering if a new player will arrive on the stage that brings back the privacy controls that users once had. I wonder if Facebook will buckle and bring in a whole lot of strict privacy controls not the complex mess they have now that is confusing and doesn’t give you much control at all. I wonder if they will be sued by some government department, state, company or individual.

If I were to start some form of Facebook clone there are a few things I would do:

  • Use people’s real names.
  • Allow people to list their birthday – birthday wishes are cool, but not publicly list their year of birth.
  • Allow people to upload and tag photos – but photos tagged of other individuals must have their permission for the tag first.
  • No public profiles.
  • You must be registered on the site to access any other members.
  • People can search for others but only on name, email address (not publically listed but searchable), workplace, school, college or sports team, but not common interest.
  • Not allow applications that access other user’s private details. If you want to do some sort of quiz that is cool, but having third party applications mine other user’s data without their permission is wrong.
  • Have fan pages for companies, and political causes. But disable pages that require you to join something before you can see all the details – and irony with facebook is fan pages often have more privacy controls than user pages.

These are just a few thoughts, I don’t have time, or energy, or the will power to start my own clone and have it reach a critical mass. However, these thoughts are welcome to be used by anyone who is willing too – and please do. I am planning on deactivating my Facebook account in a week’s time.

And for those people who think Facebook is too big to fail just look at what happened to MySpace. This Alexa traffic graph shows it nicely.
Alexa Graph

Facebook Connections Be Damned

Posted on by Brad Heap

I have been using Facebook for around 3 years now. I originally set up my Facebook account at the same time as I was setting up Myspace and Bebo accounts to connect with students when I heavily involved in student politics. At the end of 2008 when I finished my stint in the political arena I deleted my Bebo and Myspace profiles but kept my Facebook account. The key reason for me keeping my Facebook account was due to critical mass. I had so many friends on Facebook the majority of whom are from High School and it was a good way to keep tabs on who was where and doing what. However Facebook’s latest move to make more of my details public has me convinced that Facebook is nothing more than a mass identity theft ring.

This morning when I logged into my Facebook account I was presented with a pop up box asking me to connect my personal info – workplaces, schools and colleges, and likes to public pages. It was either tick a box to connect or untick not to connect, there was no way to see the content of the pages that would be linked to before confirming or denying the connection. To see what this new development entailed I click on select all and connect for my profile thinking that the workplace connections would correctly link through to the fan pages for these companies. The annoying thing is they didn’t. Instead they linked through to automatically generated info pages about each of my workplaces, schools, and likes.

The first thing I noticed about these automatically generated pages is they brought a lot of content across from Wikipedia. Now Facebook do have a nice little disclaimer on the bottom of each automatically generated page claiming: “Description above from the Wikipedia article Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, licensed under CC-BY-SA“. However I wonder if they are actually violating the terms of the license by using the content and then only claiming that section of the page is covered by that copyright license. It is clear to me that they are building the rest of the page on top of that. In particular if they state “Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help.” If Facebook does not license these new pages under the CC-BY-SA license then I expect some form of lawsuit.

Anyway this copyright discussion has me side tracked a little. What I am most pissed off about is the way that Facebook through this connection thingy in my face and now I have no way of disabling links to connections I do not want to share links to. Just because I worked at Kathmandu, a clothing store in NZ, Aus and the UK does not mean I want a connection to Kathmandu, Nepal. And just because I like the book 1984 does not mean that I want a connection to all the George Orwell fans out there. Now I realise that prior to these connections you could search for people based on the information that you provided in your likes and workplaces sections. But this new addition goes well beyond finding people through it. If people want to find me by a certain keyword that I list that is cool, but to just throw a whole page together and say I like this thing with no way of disabling it once it is enabled and no clear instructions on what you are accepting is wrong.

This is the first time Facebook has really pissed me off over a privacy matter. As a response I have removed all my work history and about half of my likes. Furthermore I am seriously considering “deactivating” my account, I would delete it but Facebook doesn’t give you that option.

Update: There is a Facebook Blog Post on this subject, reading it is scary enough but the comments are pretty telling in how pissed off people are about this. Essentially the gist of the post is any info you list will be public and if you don’t won’t it public don’t list it.

Update 2: I have been reading through some of the 3,000+ comments on the Facebook Blog Post. Some of the more pointed ones:

You created a Community Page for MY company that I OWN – and I cannot control what’s on it.

NOT COOL.

This feature is terrible. On a personal level, you hosed all of my interests when you added it. On a professional level, you have created a duplicate page for my organization, the U-M (University of Michigan) Ginsberg Center. We already have a facebook community page for ourselves; now when people add us as an interest or an employer there will be a new page created. You guys really need to start thinking the implications of these changes through before you make them.

I happen to like my “boring text”. You should give people the option to either keep it the old way or go with this new way.

I really HATE the links to everything in my profile. I cannot personalize it the way I want or say what I want – I DO NOT WANT LINKS TO EVERYTHING I HAVE ON MY PROFILE!! I want to be able to write what I want on my profile and everything does not HAVE to be linked! This is the most assinine change you have made to date. You talk about privacy issues – where’s the privacy in linking to the town where I live or my hometown or my schools that I attended or my work? THIS IS A TOTAL INVASION OF MY PRIVACY!! My whole family is on FB (75 of us) and we are seriously contemplating switching back to MySpace or Twitter!

This is ridiculous. I just deleted all of my interests, etc, etc, etc because of you FORCING ME to “like” something. Facebook has become infantile and archaic . If you want to charge for facebook, then charge – but don’t force me to contribue to your revenue and ad clicking by forcing my PERSONAL interests to be linked to some idiotic page you wrote on what you think my interest actually is.

Hey I paid for that!

Posted on by Brad Heap

Interesting post on the New York Times blog site: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/

It turns out that when you buy an ebook through Amazon’s new Kindle ebook reader you actually don’t really buy it and furthermore at a later date they can decide to remotely delete it off the mobile device.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

I suppose that it is a good thing that the accounts were credited. But to just go onto someones mobile device and delete things. Now that is scary. What other data do they have access too?

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

You can’t resell or donate them, but Amazon can unsell them and delete them without your permission.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Scary.

And ironic. But this brings up a more pressing issue. What happens if someone does something or releases something really controversial say an Album or Book no longer can you be one of the few in possession of the item because it can be removed from you. What happens when the government decides to censor our books or music, could they delete all our iTunes files overnight in secret?

The HoS solution to Google Street View

Posted on by Brad Heap

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10546856

There’s only one way to be sure that you won’t be seen in public: don’t go out. And that constitutes a complete answer to the privacy geeks who lament that Google Street View, which went online in New Zealand this week, is a dangerous invasion of our privacy.

…

They’re a few years too late. Google Earth, active for some years, has allowed anyone with a decent PC to inspect aerial views of your backyard much more up-to-date than those that will be loaded biennially by Street View. And it seems a bit silly to get uptight about a static image of a moment in time on your street that would be visible, in much higher-definition and in real time, to anyone driving by.

It’s called Street View for a reason. The camera isn’t coming down your drive, up the steps and into the kitchen. When it does, it will be called reality television. Now there’s an idea whose time has come.

I for one accept that privacy is a word of the 20th century and not the 21st and that is why I don’t care about what is transparent to the world, I am me and the world has to live with that.