In today’s Quick Hits, we talk about Facebook’s eventual IPO, how wall posts and pokes have changed the way people break up, and why Google is out of the doghouse in Great Britain.
It would appear that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t satisfied with having the world’s largest social networking website. No, he wants to go bigger. Which explains why Facebook “probably” won’t file for an initial public offering until 2012. As long as Zuckerberg is in charge of a private company, he maintains control. Once public shareholders get involved, however, the scrutiny over his decisions will only increase.
Speaking of Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old CEO had some interesting things to say about privacy during an appearance at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last week. According to AllFacebook, Zuckerberg discussed how engagement has decreased in the United States as a result of advanced privacy settings. Clearly, this runs contrary to his goals for the company and is a big reason why Facebook takes such pains to make the website as open as possible.
In an interview for Today, Ilana Gershon, the author of “The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media,” discusses how social media technology has changed the way that college-aged individuals hook up and break up. The article also touches on the creepy practice of Facebook stalking an ex-partner, providing one frightening example: “The most unusual form of stalking came from a member of the older generation. A woman in the midst of divorce figured out her partner’s new lover by matching films in their Netflix queue against favorite movies listed on the suspected new lover’s Facebook page.”
Recently, a security researcher released a public list of 100 million Facebook profiles to numerous torrent websites. Quickly, some in the media began tracking who was downloading the data by their IP address. To their shock, it appeared that some major companies were downloading the information, implying that companies planned to use the information for marketing purposes. In an article for The Atlantic, Niraj Chokshi discusses how these fears are overblown and that it is more likely that one individual, using a company computer, attempted to download the data out of curiosity.
After months of scrutiny, “the British government’s data-protection agency yesterday cleared Google of collecting ‘meaningful personal details’ during the company’s Street View wireless data breach earlier this year.” According to InformationWeek, “the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded Google’s cars gathered only fragments and that this information could not be linked to identifiable individuals.” Google still faces scrutiny over the Wi-Fi leak in other countries, specifically Germany.
We could go on and on offering reasons why you need to protect your online reputation, but why waste our words when we can show you instead. Check out this new video from the team here at Reputation.com.
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In today’s Quick Hits, we talk about the launch of Facebook Questions, how political posturing is stalling consumer privacy legislation, and why the military is interested in social media security.
Facebook officially launched its long-anticipated Q&A feature, Facebook Questions yesterday. According to Mashable, Facebook Questions is “similar in concept to Yahoo! Answers, Quora and Mahalo,” and “gives users the opportunity to ask questions just by clicking the ‘Ask Question’ button on the homepage.” When a user asks a question, it goes out to the whole Facebook community (or at least to people in the Facebook community whom Facebook indicates would be a good source of information for the specific subject matter).
Given Facebook’s massive built-in userbase, Questions could become a major source of searchable content for the site, meaning more potential advertising space. Because the questions go out to the whole site, however, Facebook Questions will also likely rekindle the Facebook privacy debate.
Rob Bowes, the security consultant responsible for harvesting and sharing public data from over 100 million Facebook profiles, recently spoke with the BBC to explain how and why he gathered the information. Bowes says he compiled the data as research for a product his company was testing. Once he compiled the data, however, he decided it might be useful for researchers so he released it on torrent websites.
Bowes says that because the information was all publicly accessible, he hasn’t done anything wrong, and Facebook agrees with him. Still, Bowes makes a good point when he explains that the nature of Internet data allows people like him to compile large amounts of data in a searchable format. Even though the information itself may seem innocuous, it can be significant on a large scale. As Bowes says, “Having the name of one person means nothing, and having the name of a hundred people means nothing; it isn’t statistically significant. But when you start scaling to 170 million, statistical data emerges that we have never seen in the past.”
A Connecticut school superintendent is in trouble with the school board after bragging about how easy his job is on Facebook. According to the news report, the man wrote on his Facebook page that “the school district was closed, that he slept until 10 a.m. and then browsed the Internet.” He went on to say, “If every day is like this, it’ll be the best job ever.” The Board of Education will determine whether to punish the man in a special meeting on August 5th.
Declan McCullogh at CNET broke down Tuesday’s Senate Committee hearing on Internet privacy and has come to the conclusion that there is “zero consensus on what approach to take” to the issue. McCullogh details how the committee members veered from one subject to the next with little understanding of the issues, often leading to humorous (or at the very least awkward) exchanges with representatives from Facebook, Google, and other technology companies.Ultimately, we shouldn’t expect a real Internet privacy law to be passed until 2011.
Online privacy expert and University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow was one of the guests at Tuesday’s Senate Committee hearing. Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post had the opportunity to sit down with Turow while he was in Washington D.C. to ask him about the hearings and what kind of legislation he thinks the government might develop to deal with consumer privacy issues. Turow also discusses ways that companies can self-regulate their industry and avoid possible legislation.
According to NetworkWorld, the U.S. Military is looking at ways to improve social media security. Quoting the report, “the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week issued a call for information on how it can help develop technology to best protect the rich private details that are often available on social media sites.” While most examinations of social media technology have focused on consumer privacy, it stands to reason that the information on social media websites could also be important to the military as well as law enforcement officials.
In today’s Quick Hits we find out that nobody would pay to use Twitter, learn how info from 100 million public Facebook profiles has been harvested and shared, and wonder whether it does any good to criticize Google over privacy offenses.
Millions of people love using Twitter everyday, but if you asked them to pay for the service, things change in a hurry. According to a new study from the USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, of the 49 percent of Internet users surveyed who have used services like Twitter, zero percent said they’d be willing to pay for it. Without substantial improvements for paying customers, there’s no reason to expect a user to pay for something that they’re used to getting free. This underscores the reason why social media websites often rely on targeted advertising to turn profits.
Yesterday, representatives of Google, Facebook and Apple testified on issues of Internet privacy before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. This article from the San Jose Mercury News analyzes the hearing, during which Senators sought tighter restrictions on behavioral advertising while tech companies made the point that their advertising is worth billions of dollars to the economy. Representatives from the FTC and FCC were also in attendance.
This article from the Dallas News details how the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district is struggling to distinguish the Facebook Fan Page that they created from the Facebook Community Page that Facebook automatically created. Though seemingly innocuous, this article touches on an important issue for school districts, small business owners, and anyone else using Facebook Fan Pages. In order to own your presence on Facebook, you must be proactive in establishing your official page and reaching out to your community of users.
According to the IT website Thinq, information about 100 million Facebook pages has been found on an Internet torrent website for peer to peer sharing. The data was harvested by Ron Bowes of Skull Security using a custom-made web crawler program. According to Thinq, “The file contains user account names and a URL for each user’s profile page, from which details such as addresses, dates of birth or phone numbers can be accessed. Accessing a user’s page from the list will also enable you to click through to friends’ profiles – even if those friends have made themselves non-searchable.” Interestingly, Bowes didn’t do anything illegal in harvesting the information, as it was found in Facebook’s open access directory.
In an article for Forbes’ “On The Docket” blog, Glenn G. Lammi argues that pouncing on Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies for privacy violations is useless so long as our overarching privacy laws are not modernized and centralized. Lammi says that “piecemeal” approaches to privacy enforcement only serve to “chill entrepreneurship, and impair job creation” and that a stable law, applicable across all states, is the best way to approach the issue.
In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Jeffrey Rosen wrote a long and thoughtful article on Internet privacy titled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” If you have not yet read the article, I encourage you to check it out. It is one of the best-written and most thorough examinations of the issues surrounding privacy online and why the permanent memory of the web can mean permanent problems for individuals with damaged online reputations.
As a supplement to the New York Times Magazine article, the New York Times Bits Blog ran a special Q&A feature for readers. The Q&A featured law professor Paul Ohm of the University of Colorado and Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. In Part One of the Q&A, the experts discuss a variety of issues related to Internet privacy, including the best way to delete one’s social networking accounts, how one’s online reputation affects job hunting, and ways to influence top Google search results. In Part Two, they discuss using good judgment on Twitter, whether pseudonyms are really anonymous, and how to manage people with similar names online.
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