Fighting For Lack of Privacy?

Surprisingly, finalists of a contest are competing to lose their privacy for 1 month. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is looking for someone to live in their museum for exactly 1 month and blog about their experiences. During this time, the public is free to stare at this person's life-in-a-cube. Although the living space looks pretty sweet, would you allow strangers to stare at your actions for an entire month?

Believe it or not, people reveal private information for the public to see everyday, but usually not intentionally. In fact, President Obama is encouraging companies to redesign their communications systems to make surveillance easier. While this may seem extreme to us, some governments have threatened to ban Blackberry devices unless the company made it easier for the government to spy on its users. But won't this increase the incentive more than ever before for hackers to infiltrate government systems? Also, many times rules are exactly followed. The article I found states that for phone call and e-mails in the U.S. after 9/11,

Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn't always match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and famous people like former President Bill Clinton

But the government and law enforcement officials aren't trying to put on the facade that all of your information will be private. In fact, the Obama Administration specifically stated that "Americans should expect no privacy while in public". With GPS devices, one's location can be instantly tracked. In class, we found that there were over 300 cameras on our University of Maryland campus, alone. Can you think of any other examples of how our privacy is violated off the internet?

Meanwhile, take a look at the following video, paying close attention to the segment at 1:35.

What happens in Vegas no longer stays on Vegas. It can permanently stay on several social networking sites, even without your consent. Someone else can post photos or videos of your vacation without you even knowing. After all, most people have cell phones these days and most phones and cameras. Therefore, you must be careful what you post!

International Internet: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Regarding the internet's privacy and speed, there are many sources of media but these many sources have both reliable and unreliable forms of information.

For example, according to The Onion, Sierra Leone has the safest internet in the world. The Onion has a reputation for being an unreliable source. However, if one didn't know that, other signs could lead them to this conclusion. First off, the "article" is only one sentence, stating:

"A survey of computer viruses and malware attacks found Sierra Leone was the safest place in the world to surf the web. What do you think?"

The lack of further statistics leads one to question the claim being stated. Secondly, below the "article" are 3 different people and quotes from each of the 3 people. However, the quotes don't even relate to the article. Both the lack of statistics and users opinions make one further doubt the credibility of the claim.

Not only did this article raise suspicions but other articles on The Onion's website did the same. One article entitled "Neighbor's Wi-Fi Password Must Be Something Good". Usually, articles about someone trying to hack into a neighbor's internet signal isn't published on credible news sources because it is thought to be illegal and unethical. To be seen as more credible, the article could have discussed the frequency of how common passwords are being increasingly used for online accounts since people have more accounts than ever before. This would involve more statistics and data rather than just describing the actions of someone's neighbor.

For a more credible source, one could look towards news articles on sites such as CNN. The peer-review process and the good reputation of being a credible and unbiased source make CNN an example of good information. For example, a recent article published names Chattanooga, Tennessee as having the fastest internet. The rate of speed, quotes from the mayor, and pricing quotes for the internet services are included in this article.

Sites such as CNN.com are reliable because they provide the objective story with no biasing because it presents facts and opinions of both sides of the issue. This semester I am enrolled in another journalism class, Media Literacy. Media literacy is "the ability to sift through and analyze messages that inform, entertain and sell to us daily". The ability to sift through information is difficult today when the truth and lies intertwine together in media. Last class we discussed convergence media where you combine information from different technological sources. For example, when my friend got a text that Michael Jackson had died a year and a half ago, I had to turn the TV to CNN to see if it were true. I think that today, people have to get information from many difference sources to be sure they have the correct information.

Illusion of Control

Article Title: Privacy as information access and illusory control: The case of the Facebook News Feed privacy outcry
http://bit.ly/cUMbAf
This paper discusses an experiment of 172 current college Facebook users. It exploits the privacy concerns of Facebook users. Surveys asked the participants about how they used social networking sites and how they shared information online. Due to the addition of the News Feed and Mini Feed features, people think they have less control over what is being shared because its easier to access the information.

But when you think about it, the amount of control is ideally the same as before News and Mini Feeds. The ability to control who saw things on your profile had always been there, maybe not as robust, but it was still there. The visibility of postings is all that changed and it makes me wonder if Facebook removed these features, would people think their information was more private.

Battle for the Soul of Internet

In response to a Time article from 2005:

I semi-agree with the author that the danger of using the internet is that it's too public. I think that the downfall of the internet is that people do not have to act under their true identities.

I'm not sure if I agree with the statement that the web was not ready to conduct business in 2005. While I was not making purchases online at this time due to my lack of a credit card, I know people who were. eBay was widely popular at the time and although there may have been scams, there are still scams online today so if that's the basis of saying the public is or isn't ready for business on the web, then we are still not ready today.

Evolution 3.0

This concern/idea of privacy has been around for years. Below shows the results that Google has containing the word privacy dating back to 1900. The term has been gaining an enormous amount of popularity since the 1990s.

Starting with the fourth amendment which protects one from searches and seizures.

Along with this, the first amendment which grants freedom of speech complicates matters of privacy. Privacy can also be thought of as surveillance. This idea of surveillance was originally someone watching you in your own home but more recently people can observe from a distance by planting bugs, detecting sounds from windows and reading electronic submissions. Protecting a user from electronic surveillance has become more prevalent in the last 2 years as people place personal information on social networking sites. A balance between sharing personal, identifying information and protecting that information must be found.

You may wonder, who thought of Youtube or Twitter or other social networking services? These obviously did not come about overnight. There was great thinking involved in the creation of such sites. It all started with Usenets in 1979 which allowed users to post articles to groups called "newsgroups". Next came Bulletin Board Systems in the late 70s which allowed users to log on to a system and contact others. Online and chatting services came next allowing users to play games and shop online. But these advances did not come until nearly 2 decades later in the 90s. Dating and blogging sites furthered the advancement of social networking sites until Friendster came about in 2002 as the world's first modern social network. (I'm pretty sure I've signed up for a Friendster account but know of no one who actually uses the site.)

The graph below shows the growth of Myspace, whose user population peaked in 2007, and Facebook, whose user population is steadily rising.

Friendster was originally developed to allow a safer place for people to meet friends online. Hi5 allowed users to set their profiles public or private. Sites like LinkedIn and Myspace allow

contact through private messages as well as publicly on profile "walls". What are 2 things that all of these social networking sites have in common? All of them have gradually added features of the years to accommodate the interest changes of their users AND they all are concerned about the privacy of their user population.

It seems like the only way you can have web privacy these days is by following the example of the person to the right.

You may think that I am biased towards social networking privacy, more specifically Facebook privacy. But, when I perform a simple Google search with the word "privacy" specifically looking at results from 2010, 5 out of 10 of the 1st page of results deals with Facebook privacy. Therefore, the public is growing more wary of this particular service and it's a huge concern, especially considering that it is the largest social networking site out there with over 500 million users. In the future though, I promise I will discuss a wider diversity of issues. Just you wait and see...

A Ticking Timeline

Apple Ping vs. Facebook

What is Ping?

Ping is a new music-focused social networking service being introduced by Apple which lets someone follow their favorite artists and even so what music their friends are listening to.

Why is it better than Facebook?

3 words - it is simple. Facebook with all of its applications and games and photo tagging features is becoming too complicated for the typical user to handle. That's why I think more people are moving towards Twitter. Apple is advertising that their privacy settings are "super simple to set up". The simplicity alone may be enough to sell Ping to the public.

Facebook + Ping = "frenemies"

Since Ping allows you to see what your Facebook friends are listening to, Facebook is a stakeholder in this venture. However, as of last Thursday, Facebook has blocked Apple's Ping from gaining access to their services saying "Ping had the potential to send so much traffic Facebook's way and cause site stability and infrastructure problems".

I wonder if Apple and Facebook can work out their "frenemy" (friend-enemy) situation soon so that Ping can be released.

Intro

The topic I chose to blog about is web privacy. This broad topic includes password privacy, privacy on social networking sites, and location-sharing applications.

My inspiration for this topic came from my summer research at Carnegie Mellon University where I worked in the Usable Privacy and Security Lab. Here, I researched Facebook privacy settings and controls. Facebook constantly changes its privacy settings and recently the changes have attracted a lot of attention in the media.

As of 2010, the new privacy settings on Facebook had 5,830 words - more words than the U.S. Constitution! The information visualization below shows the evolution of Facebook privacy and how more settings have become public by default over the years. (click the picture to be taken to the animated version)

At the research lab, we ran empirical studies and found that many people do not know how to use the privacy controls and features that Facebook already has in place. This finding sparked me to learn about privacy issues on other websites as well.

Therefore, this semester I plan to delve into the privacy settings and features of Twitter, LinkedIn and other SNS. In addition, I would like to look at password privacy for secure sites like online banking vs. other sites such as e-mail or Youtube. It would also be interesting to include information about Foursquare, Facebook Places and other location sharing services. Also, I plan to include information on other privacy and usability issues related to websites (not just the ones listed above) and maybe even privacy with technology not strictly on the web.

Hopefully this blog can help to clear the cloud of mystery surrounding technology and privacy.