In today’s Quick Hits we talk about some cybersafety issues, new research from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and why you should never complain about customers on Facebook.
Could MySpace be making a comeback? Recently, MySpace announced plans to make its website more private, offering an alternative to the more open Facebook. In response to MySpace’s maneuvering, a Facebook spokesperson told CNN “We’re listening to feedback and evaluating the best way to respond to concerns. We understand that maintaining people’s privacy is of paramount importance, not just to them but to the eco-system of the Internet as a whole and we welcome innovative ideas in this space.” Will those innovative ideas be coming from one of Facebook’s long-dormant competitors?
This past weekend, hundreds of thousands of Facebook users found their PCs infected by adware after clicking on a link promising the “sexiest video ever.” The adware attack, which Facebook disabled within 15 hours, still managed to infect a huge number of users. Roger Thompson, the chief research officer at AVG Technologies, attributed the fast spread of the attack to the “viral nature” of social networking.
“Facebook is very responsive to threats when we identify them, and removing these applications as soon as they find them, but they’re still able to generate huge traffic, just because of the viral nature of social networks. It is staggering how many threats were propagated before they were stopped.”
After being forced to stay an hour past closing by a couple who spent three hours at dinner, a Charlotte waitress was annoyed to receive a $5 tip. Rather than suffer in silence, she went on Facebook to complain about the customers. Unfortunately, she didn’t know her bosses were watching. When they saw the post, they fired her from her job.
Anyone who has worked in the food service industry knows how frustrating the job can be. Still, if you get a lousy tip or a bad customer, the first thing you do should not be to complain about them on Facebook. Your fellow servers might understand, but management most certainly will not.
While Facebook was being hit with an adware attack, Twitter was dealing with its own cybercrime problems. According to USA Today, Twitter has been combatting a widespread phishing attack on the website, which tricks users into giving up their log-in credentials for the promise of “more Twitter followers.” Once a scammer has control of an account, they can use it to promote spam links or direct users to other malicious websites.
Here are a few of the phrases to watch out for:
FREE MORE TWITTER FOLLOWERS!
CHECK out this site, im a member of it, gets you more followers.
In a stunning report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has discovered that “the overwhelming majority of Internet users could be uniquely fingerprinted and tracked using only the configuration and version information that their browsers make available to websites.” Studying over 500,000 browsers, the EFF was able to determine that 84% had unique configurations. When a browser used Flash or Java, that number grew to 94%.
Given how little information it took the EFF to identify these unique fingerprints, it is guaranteed that someone with even more data (cookies, IP addresses, etc.) could put together a incredibly accurate user profile.
In 1993, cartoonist Peter Steiner drew this now-famous comic for the New Yorker. At the time, it perfectly captured a key issue surrounding emerging Internet technology, namely the ability to communicate with someone online completely anonymously. However, with the emergence of social media in the last decade, the resonance of this cartoon has faded.
While anonymity is still an important part of Internet culture, it is rapidly being replaced by a more open mentality. In the social media world, having a clearly defined identity is not only expected, but embraced. More often than not, you want the world to see your blog, or your Twitter, or your Flickr account. There are also times, however, when you don’t want the world to see what you’re sharing online, which is why Facebook has gotten so much bad press over the last couple of months.
When the company first began, Facebook was billed as a way for users to stay in touch and share things with friends through the creation of a closed community. After giving users this expectation of privacy, Facebook pulled a bait-and-switch, flipping its privacy controls so that public sharing was now a default. Needless to say, many users were embarrassed to find that their “private” lives were now public and that the only way they could set things right was through a complicated series of privacy settings.
Recently, cartoonist Rob Cottingham of the popular webcomic Noise to Signal captured the issue of Facebook privacy online with a clever reimagining of Peter Steiner’s original New Yorker comic strip. Check out the comic below, and feel free to leave your own comment on this post. It can be about the comic, Facebook, or any other issue that comes to mind.
In today’s Quick Hits, we talk about Google’s “mistake” and whether in the future wireless devices might include tangible controls for managing privacy. Check it out.
Contrary to the company’s previous statements on the issue, Google admitted on Friday that it has been inadvertently collecting private data through its Google Street View vehicles since 2006. In Europe, where privacy laws are much more stringent, Google’s mistake (if it was indeed a mistake and not a hushed-up policy) could cause the company significant legal problems.
Originally, Google claims its Street View cars only collected information related to “the publicly broadcast ID number of the device, which is called a MAC address, and the name assigned to it by the owner, called an SSID.” However, subsequent analysis showed Street View cars also collected “a record of sites viewed by the user and potentially the contents of messages if users did not secure their WLANS with a password.”
After the company’s latest round of privacy changes, many users have declared their intentions to quit Facebook once and for all. Now, they can join others in protest and delete their accounts all at once on May 31st, aka Quit Facebook Day. Compared to the overall population of Facebook however, the number of users who actually quit the site may not be enough to spur the company toward any real change. Currently, Quit Facebook Day has 2927 “committed Facebook quitters,” which is a paltry amount compared to the more than 400 million total users at the site.
In an article for the Digital Domain section of the New York Times, Randall Stross makes an interesting claim that Facebook is actually less social than it pretends to be. Stross discusses how the Open Web, or the non-password protected Internet that we use for basic information gathering, is actually better at delivering “recommended” information than Facebook. Considering that Facebook users receive information filtered directly by friends and connections, Stross’ argument seems backwards at first glance. When you take into account the fact that Google’s algorithm is partly defined by a site’s popularity, however, you can see what he’s getting at. The web already offers recommended information naturally.
In a blog post for GigaOm, Stacy Higginbotham relates an interesting privacy proposal from wireless analyst Chetan Sharma. Focusing specifically on Internet access via wireless devices, Sharma proposed an external control, similar to a cell phones volume buttons, that “allows users to open/close privacy across all applications and services with the touch of a button.” Incorporating a feature like this would be extremely difficult given the wide range of web applications now available for download on 3G phones, but the idea itself is interesting. Rather than having to manage your privacy controls through a confusing multi-step process, you could simply click a button.
This article from Mashable offers a range of advice for parents raising kids in the Internet age, from tips on setting boundaries to monitoring Internet activity. This is an area we have covered often, but the article still offers considerable value for parents.
Facebook and Zynga, the makers of the super popular and often derided social networking game Farmville, may soon part ways over payment issues.Recently, Facebook switched the way that users can purchase applications by introducing “Facebook credits.” Zynga doesn’t want to pay the 30% commission to Facebook when this form of currency is used and is considering creating its own social networking website.
At the company’s all hands meeting yesterday, Facebook did make a couple of security enhancements, though nothing related strictly to the issue of privacy. According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook’s security changes involve enhanced log-in procedures with the aim of reducing phishing attacks on the site.
From now on, Facebook will alert users of unusual activity on their accounts. In other words, if someone tries to log into your account from China, Facebook will notify you and add an additional step to the log-in process. Additionally, Facebook will now allow users to register their devices with Facebook, so that the company knows which computers you use to access your account regularly.
We’ve discussed how you can use social media to help with your job search, but Laughing Squid has the story of one man who took a different creative step. Using $6 worth of Google AdWords, marketing professional Alec Brownstein purchased advertising for the names of several top New York City creative directors. When they Googled their own names (something that everyone should do with regularity), the first sponsored ad they saw was from Brownstein asking for a job.
Through his efforts, Brownstein secured interviews with four of the employers, got job offers from two of them, and eventually accepted a new marketing position with Y&R New York.
In response to ongoing criticism against the company, Facebook has ordered an all hands meeting for 4:00pm PST today to discuss concerns over privacy. AllFacebook speculates that Facebook will announce some kind of privacy change at the meeting with the most likely possibility being a temporary halt to the Instant Personalization Program. Facebook could also change the program to be opt-in by default rather than opt-out.
Recently, several news outlets reported that Facebook had hired former FTC chair Timothy Muris to help the company combat government investigations over privacy-related issues. According to a new article at PC Mag, however, Facebook denies that it has hired Muris.
Google is again facing international criticism over its Street View project, this time from the land down under. In a recent letter to Google, Electronic Frontiers Australia and the Australian Privacy Foundation asked the company to explain why it collects personal Wi-Fi network data from Australian homes via its Street View vehicles. The full letter can be found at the Sydney Morning Herald.
An Ohio election worker has been fired from her position after using her Facebook account to share information about an individual voting decision. According to the Toledo Blade, “[The worker] had posted a comment on a Facebook page May 3 stating that Allan Block, chairman of The Blade’s parent company,Block Communications Inc., had just gone into the Early Vote Center “to vote for Jon Stainbrook.” The same Facebook posting referred to Mr. Stainbrook as “a snake.”
The election worker acknowledges “making stupid comments,” but she still feels she shouldn’t have been terminated from her position. What do you think?
The Huffington Post has the story of a single mom who was fired from her day job after her employer discovered she operated a sex blog in her spare time. According to the blogger, she tried to keep her public life and private life as separate as possible, even publishing to the blog anonymously, but because she mistakenly used her real name on Twitter. She changed her name on Twitter when she realized that it was public, but a Google cache still showed it.
Although her company acknowledged that this woman was a good worker, they said in a letter that they “cannot risk any possible link between our mission and the sort of photos and material that you openly share with the online public.” This story demonstrates how easily your private life and public Internet persona can become linked if you’re not careful about how you manage your online reputation.
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