Google+ and Privacy

Love what I see from Google+. The problem I see from Google all revolves around the issue of personal privacy. Can we make on-line information private? There are, different definitions of privacy. Some/all information will be kept in corporate databases - but who will access this information and how? I don't care about advertising/market research. I do care on "unauthorized" people being able to search or query the data for my personal information.

There are several levels of privacy:
1. Companies using the data for market research
2. Companies advertising goods and services
3. Individuals researching you and finding "unauthorized/private" data
4. The government researching you / keeping dossiers.

All I have to say is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...
4th Amendment to the US Constitution

This YouTube video is an excellent introduction to Google+.

The Psychology of Users

One thing to factor in when coming up with a strategy with business owners is the psychology of users, both that of the site owners themselves and the site users. Site owners want to have what others have or they feel that they would be lacking in comparison to their competitors.

Then there is the psychology of site consumers who feel that the site is less professional without the gizmos that another site has.

I see this all the time in relation to social media. Some sites are better suited for social media than others. For some sites social media will never be more an unnecessary time sink and money pit.

Twitter Digg and Predictions

I just looked at an old TechCrunch article Did Twitter Just Pass Digg? [January 20th, 2009] The author, and many of the commenters, cannot believe that Twitter caught up with Digg. I wish I had seen this article earlier. I cannot believe that they didn't see how FAST Twitter was growing. It is immaterial whether Twitter surpassed Digg in January of 2009 or a month or two earlier or later.

To be fair to the writer, and the commenters, Twitter and Digg have two very different models and their usage is difficult to compare. How does one compare a tweet with a news aggregator such as Digg?

Facebook partners with AOL

ReadWriteWeb has an excellent post on the partnership between Facebook and AOL. Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what's at stake here, it's whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.

With all its problems Facebook has become THE social networking site. Some people are concerned with Facebook becoming a "monopoly." Privacy, and Facebook's approach to personal information, is the concern; not monopoly powers.

Facebook's Privacy Policy Changes

I haven’t been happy with Facebook for a while now. My concerns can be placed into two categories: one is usability and the second is privacy. The usability issues have not improved and now, I fear, that the privacy issues have worsened. I have to thank EFF for reviewing Facebook’s Privacy Settings.

Although sold as a "privacy" revamp, Facebook's new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public. The privacy "transition tool" that guides users through the configuration will "recommend" — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to "Your Networks and Friends"

At this point there's no "if" about it: the Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook's users

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends. Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a "fan" of — as "publicly available information" or "PAI." Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting — shown below — has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.

Mr. Zuckerberg whatever happened to: ”Our philosophy is that people own their information and control whom they share it with..."

Social Media and Privacy

In case you haven't seen it read the story of How Facebook Ended My Marriage.

Update: A very strange new twist has made this much more public than I ever feared. Boing Boing, the top blog on the Internet, Time Magazine’s blog, the London Standard, Libération the French newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Fast Company have now all mentioned our experience. Is this the 21st century equivalent of a printed wedding announcement?

Yes Thomas it is the 21st C equivalent of a printed wedding announcement.

Facebook and Privacy

A week ago Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post stating thatOn Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information. And yet a few paragraphs into the post he writes:

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

Mr. Zuckerberg many people disagree with you. Facebook is not perceived of as email, where you send information to others. It is perceived to be a place where you can put up information, a journal so to speak, and share parts of it with friends and other parts with the world at large. Facebook is the medium by which the sharing takes place and as such *should* not have a say in the matter any more than does a piece of paper has a say in who can see a love note written on it. The perception is wrong, of course, that is why there is outrage.

Facebook has many problems. Privacy is the worst of those problems. As with email one should not put anything on Facebook which you would not be willing to have the whole world be aware of.

When a truly private system arises Facebook will reap what is has sown and go the way of earlier social networking sites. I don't wish this on Facebook, only that they recognize the importance of privacy. Today's teenagers will become tomorrows adults and they will not want their high school angst and insecurities displayed to their adult friends.

Facebook and Third-Party Apps

I have my problems with Facebook, but the one thing they do very well, and for me the most appealing aspect of the site, is their incorporation of third-party applications. There are many options to choose from and it is constantly expanding: quizzes, travel maps, feeds and much, much more.

This willingness to add more functionality, especially third-party apps, gives me confidence that they will not go the way of Friendster. Looking at the popularity of Facebook's Travel apps; their willingness to accept 3rd Party apps; noticing that Google's PicasaWeb is superior to what Facebook has yet done; knowing that Google is becoming an App superstore; it's not unthinkable that the day will come when Facebook and Google will combine forces. Or one will swallow the other.

What separates Blogs from other Social Media?

The taxonomy of social media is complex. Social media usually refers to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other sites. But in its widest sense social media can be any site that networks of people, including newsgroups, listservs and sites such as YouTube. YouTube is still primarily a file sharing site but with the addition of comments they are now more social media than file sharing sites.

Blogs are also part of on-line social networks but are different from the other social media sites in two ways. One person may have several blogs, each focusing upon a different topic but it rarely makes sense to have multiple Facebook or LinkedIn accounts. The second is the concept of time. In social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, it is the NOW that matters. Businesses may care to keep a record for legal purposes but most users rarely care about what was communicated 24 hours ago (if not 24 minutes ago). Whereas, with blogs, the continuity of posts matters. They are not focused upon the here and now.

All strategies used in attracting clients and consumers must focus first and foremost upon these two aspects, especially the concept of time.

Privacy, Social Media, Censorship and more

I just read several papers presented last June at the 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Cambridge, England. They were fascinating reads and are highly recommended.

Imagined Communities Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook focuses upon the quantity of data that is unwittingly shared on Facebook and other social networking sites.

Some [users] manage their privacy concerns by trusting their ability to control the information they provide and the external access to it. However, we find significant misconceptions among some members about the online community’s reach and the visibility of their profiles.

Ignoring the Great Firewall of China examines how governments, not only China's, prevent access to websites. Sometimes there is a bona fide law enforcement aspect of it such as access to child pornography and in counter-terrorism. Regardless of the legitimacy of a particular action, anyone interested in privacy issues ought to be aware of the activity.

The so-called "Great Firewall of China" operates, in part, by inspecting TCP packets for keywords that are to be blocked. If the keyword is present, TCP reset packets (viz: with the RST tag set) are sent to both endpoints of the connection, which then close. However, because the original packets are passed through the Firewall unscathed, if the endpoints completely ignore the Firewall's resets, then the connection will proceed unhindered. Once one connection has been blocked, the Firewall makes further easy-to-evade attempts to block further connections from the same machine. This latter behaviour can be leveraged into a denial-of-service attack on third-party machines.

Lurkers and Commenters

Jakob Nielsen has an interesting new article in his AlertBox. The jist of the article is that "a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content."

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

So, what can be done about this? How can the site owner increase user participation? The short of it, according to Nielsen, is that you can't.

I have found that posts that have comments get more comments. It seems as people are more tempted to respond to comments than the original post; or posts with comments than posts without any comments.

EDIT 12/20/2010:

Sysomos also found that 80.6% of Twitter users have made fewer than 500 tweets, which likely points to the relative newbie status of the average Twitter user. Also noteworthy is that 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets.

It will be interesting to see what happens over time - do Twitter stats start converging to the expected 90-9-1 spread?