October 11th, 2011 | Facebook, Legal Issues, Online Reputation Management, Privacy, Quick Hits | Rob Frappier
In today’s Quick Hits, we follow up on a three-year old Facebook firing, consider social media and politics, discuss Facebook profiles and college admissions, and ponder the privacy implications of the growing “cyberarms” race.
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A former Georgia schoolteacher who was fired three years ago after an anonymous parent complained about a photo on her Facebook profile recently faced a setback in her lawsuit against the school district. The teacher had filed a lawsuit asking for her job to be reinstated, but that claim was rejected because of technical issues related to when her teaching contract expired. Her attorney still is working on winning monetary damages in the case, arguing that the teacher was not informed of her rights at the time of the incident.
Big social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are becoming more and more involved in hosting political events and debates, demonstrating a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” savvy that may help them when the issue of privacy legislation. As the AP explains, “social media giants like Facebook and Google are hosting debates and sponsoring presidential town halls. They remain indispensable tools for candidates looking to connect with voters. The companies get great public exposure for their attachment to the presidential campaign. It also helps their business interests by nurturing relationships with political leaders.”
This article from Huffington Post’s new High School section talks about how college admissions officers are using Facebook to screen applicants and shares advice on how high school students can clean up their profiles to make a good impression. As one teen in the article explains, “I treat my profile as a way for college admissions officers to get to know me outside of my academic accomplishments.”
This article from the Financial Times discusses how the “cyberarms race” between world powers may end up forcing personal privacy protections to disappear. Quoting the article, “an internet increasingly policed by intelligence agencies will be reshaped to fit country borders, says Peter Dombrowski, of the Naval War College in the US. Nations fearing attack will find ways to inspect electronic traffic just as they do people.”
October 10th, 2011 | Facebook, Internet Safety, Legal Issues, Online Reputation Management, Parenting, Privacy | Rob Frappier
In today’s Quick Hits, thoughts on Facebook’s power, teen online privacy, and why taking steps to protect yourself from junk e-mail can end up causing you to miss out on important privacy notices.
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A thief may have unwittingly outed himself when he snapped a picture using a stolen mobile phone. According to ABC News, “police in Henry County, Ga., said they now believe the thief grabbed [the victim's] cellphone, took a picture of himself and unwittingly uploaded it to her Facebook page, which automatically synced with her phone.” In this case, the woman’s predilection for sharing all of her cell phone photos online (something that we might usually recommend against) may have actually helped her.
In an op-ed for the National Times, Julian Lee writes that Facebook’s power is “unsettling,” saying “if Facebook was a government agency, its power would be as undisputed as it would be frightening.” Lee’s incisive commentary points out that legal protections lag far behind technology and that Web companies like Facebook have a practically unchecked ability to enact new privacy-invasive features with little fear of punishment. At the end of his piece, Lee touches on the idea that “free” Internet service aren’t really free saying, “it’s the price we pay for such free services, the Faustian pact into which we have entered in order to survive in an age of constant connectivity where the tentacles of Facebook — with its ambition to be the “identity platform” — are extending to every corner of the internet.”
With its new “Frictionless Sharing” feature, Facebook has teamed up with third-party websites to stream a user’s Web habits directly to his or her profile. This feature, which is unnerving to many privacy advocates, is already in place with many news websites. But not all news organizations give users the same level of privacy protection. This article from Inside Facebook discusses all of the third-party news organizations using frictionless sharing and rates them according to how much control they offer users over sharing.
In its bid to buy a massive list of e-mail addresses from bankrupt book chain Borders, Barnes & Noble was forced to send an e-mail to Borders’ customers giving them 15 days to opt out of sharing information with the new company. Ironically, as Forbes’ Kashmir Hill explains, this disclosure e-mail might not make it to all customers if they’ve taken certain steps to protect their privacy. Hill writes that “most folks who signed up for Borders accounts, or any company account, usually hand over their ‘junk e-mail address.’”
Because these aren’t the accounts people usually check (in order to keep them from massive amounts of spam), they might miss the notice. Similarly, Hill notes that because she had unsubscribed from Borders e-mail list long ago: “I was unsubscribed from a future email that would tell me that my data would be sold to another company.” In both of these cases, the company isn’t legally in the wrong, but the user still doesn’t get the disclosure, demonstrating the complexity of online privacy protections.
In this video interview with CBS News, Yahoo! Web Life Editor Heather Cabot talks about a new survey that shows kids are much savvier about online privacy than parents give them credit for, while also offering advice about “how parents can drive home the message home about the importance of online privacy.”
October 7th, 2011 | CyberBullying, Facebook, Google, Legal Issues, Online Reputation Management, Privacy, Quick Hits | Rob Frappier
In today’s Quick Hits, Facebook is hit with a lawsuit, Google adds some privacy features to Google+, and Barnes & Noble tries to swoop in on Borders’ customer base.
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A Kansas man recently filed a lawsuit against Facebook alleging that the company violated federal wiretap laws by tracking browsing data on users after they logged off the service. As ABC News explains, however, the litigation may be unsuccessful because it is difficult to prove harm in these kinds of cases. Quoting the article, “Experts say the Kansas litigation faces an uphill battle since courts in the past have tossed out similar cases against Facebook and others filed under wiretap law, finding such computer cookies are not wiretaps. In those cases that do end up being litigated the plaintiffs typically lose because they cannot prove any harm.”
There is a movement among some privacy activists to reframe what constitutes “privacy harm” in a legal sense. Stanford’s Ryan Calo has been a leading voice in the debate over the meaning of privacy harm and was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal on the subject last year.
Slate’s Katherine Goldstein has an amusing and interesting article about how her father has been “stalking” her on Twitter. Since the author showed her father how to use the site, he has been monitoring all of her updates and responding to them regularly, leading to some embarrassment and awkwardness. The article presents an interesting dynamic that many adults are facing as their older parents adopt social media technologies.
The U.S. News and World Report reports that a handful of media companies have teamed up to raise awareness about bullying with a multi-pronged digital campaign. Quoting the article, “media companies such as CNN, Cartoon Network, Facebook, and Time Inc. have started an online anti-bullying campaign designed to raise awareness. The companies launched the “Stop Bullying, Speak Up” Facebook page to give students and parents a place to voice their support for victims of bullying.” The campaign hopes to increase the number of “active bystanders” by encouraging people who speak up about bullying when they see it.
In a bid to further establish itself as the social networking website for privacy-conscious users, Google+ has added a handful of new privacy controls. According to VentureBeat, Google now lets you disable comments on Google+ posts and lock posts prior to publishing them. Previously, users would have to share the post publicly, before setting up privacy restrictions. The change is relatively simple, but intuitive and reflective of Google’s apparent desire to make Google+ the anti-Facebook in terms of privacy and sharing.
When Borders went bankrupt recently, its competitor Barnes & Noble swooped in to buy the company’s customer lists for a cool $14 million. But in purchasing the e-mail list, Barnes & Noble has drawn the wrath of consumer watchdog groups who say that the bookstore chain’s opt-out notice to customers was too vague. Regulators asked Barnes & Noble to give consumers explicit control to transfer their information to the new company, but Barnes & Noble refused to use the requested language.
October 6th, 2011 | Reputation.com News, Research | Rob Frappier
Forrester Research has seen the future, and the future is “personal data management.” In a new report, the prestigious research organization says that shifts in the economy will allow consumers to gain control over all of the data available about them online. This will be achieved primarily though the use of “personal data lockers,” or individual repositories where individuals can store and access their data to share and sell with marketers.
Currently, the data economy (which generates billions of dollars annually) is unfairly balanced in favor of marketers. Often, consumers don’t understand how their data is being tracked, collected, and sold, while those that do understand the complexities of data tracking don’t have the resources to protect their information.
As more and more consumers become aware of the significant cost associated with sharing data, they will dig in their heels and demand more control over their personal information. Rather than slowing the economy, however, this change will further spur the growth of a “privacy economy,” which will empower consumers to engage with companies on their own terms and, with time, give marketers even better and more actionable data.
Here at Reputation.com, we are happy to be leading the way in this new privacy economy. As we explained when we announced our Series D funding, Reputation.com is dedicated to developing innovative new technologies that allow consumers to control how they appear online. Currently, we are working toward this goal through the development of a Data Privacy Vault.
As the Forrester report points out, consumers will begin to take control of their data when doing is convenient and offers them some demonstrable value. Reputation.com’s advances in the personal data management field will allow this to happen.
October 6th, 2011 | Facebook, Internet Safety, Parenting, Privacy | Rob Frappier
In today’s Quick Hits, teens and young adults talk about having their online accounts hacked, Facebook readies its new design rollout, and an artist uses trash to teach about personal privacy violations.
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A new study from the AP and MTV reveals that a large percentage of teens (30%) have had their online accounts hacked, more than double the number from 2009. More distressing is the apparent attitude regarding hacking. The Wall Street Journal quotes a handful of teens and young adults who treat hacking as no big deal. Some say it’s only for fun and that they know who is doing it, so it’s okay. Others, however, are distressed by the hacking. The survey showed that 46% of respondents were upset by a hacking attack and concerned about how it might affect their image.
The Los Angeles Times has an article on Facebook’s new-look profiles and how users can protect their privacy once the new design rolls out. The article goes into detail on how some of the new tweaks may compromise privacy, including the little-known fact that current privacy settings aren’t automatically applied to old posts that will appear on user’s timelines.
A street artist named XVALA has taken to Silicon Valley to make a statement about information sharing and personal privacy violations. According to the Los Angeles Times, “the first of the series, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s Not Very Well Hung Hanger,’ features a wire coat hanger taken from Zuckerberg’s trash can. XVALA bent the hanger by hand to show Zuckerberg’s ‘manhood’ and painted it blue, the color of Facebook’s logo.” In a statement, the artist said, “I wanted to ‘expose’ Zuckerberg like he exposes Facebook users, daily.”
In an article for PCWorld, Paul Venezia explains why it’s so difficult to keep social networking sites from tracking your browsing information across the web and some of the ways you can try to keep your personal data private. As Venezia explains, ”for normal people, this situation is extremely difficult to control,” which is why social media companies are so attractive to advertisers. The data on the profile itself, paired with browsing information, is more than enough to learn an individual’s entire life story.
Inside Facebook has an insightful article with Facebook product manager Carl Sjogreen about the company’s new-look profiles and some of the safety measures in place to prevent application developers from using the “Frictionless Sharing” Open Graph platform to send out spam messages. Facebook’s balancing act between consumers and app developers is tricky, but could be very valuable for the company.
As Inside Facebook writes, “Facebook is preparing to make a major change to how users express themselves with the rollout of Timeline. It will need to clearly communicate the privacy implications of ready access to old content in order to avoid backlash. It will also need to strike a proper balance between a clean user experience and an attractive Open Graph application development Platform. If Facebook can navigate these two pitfalls, Timeline could become the richest way to represent one’s identity online.”
