Michael Zimmer.org

Speaking of the research ethics related to automatically harvesting public social networking data, we are confronted this week with the story of Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer who has spent the last six months harvesting and analyzing data from some 215 million public Facebook profile pages.
According to Warden, he exploited a flaw in Facebook’s architecture to access public profiles without needing to be signed in to a Facebook account, effectively avoiding being bound by Facebook’s Terms of Service preventing such automated harvesting of data. As a result, he amassed …

I’m currently in Savannah, GA to participate in a workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research at CSCW 2010.
This is my first time at CSCW, and looking at the set of papers for this workshop, it should be an excellent experience. I’ve submitted a brief analysis of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset release (my larger paper is going through its final edits for publication). You can download the short analysis here: Subject Privacy and the Release of the “Tastes, …

I am proposing a panel for Internet Research 11.0 titled “On the Philosophy of Facebook”. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that “information wants to be shared”, a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance. This panel will explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.

Responding to the brouhaha caused by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent proclamation that social norms on privacy have loosened, Michael Arrington (the tech blogger who was interviewing Zuckerberg at the time) has posted a piece on his blog Tech Crunch: “Ok You Luddites, Time To Chill Out On Facebook Over Privacy”
Arrington is correct that Zuckerberg never actually said that “the age of privacy is over”, and that off-line data aggregation companies like Equifax and TransUnion have been eroding privacy long before Facebook existed. However, just as Zuckerberg is wrong in …

There’s been quite a dust-up regarding Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent proclamation that social norms on privacy have changed, and that Facebook is merely reacting to these shifting norms.

Lots has already been said about Zuckerberg’s remarks, so I’m only going to add three thoughts to the conversation: What Zuckerberg said isn’t surprising, it isn’t new, and it isn’t true…

A story today on NPR’s Morning Edition news program focused on the controversy surrounding Facebook’s recent privacy upgrade downgrade: “Groups Complain To FTC About Facebook Changes”
My discussion with the reporter, Martin Kaste, covered most of the issues raised in my various posts on the issue:

How some of the new user controls represent a new paradigm for privacy within Facebook, but come into conflict with the Laws of Social Networking;
How Facebook should be applauded for giving users (some) new control over the information they share, as well as for prompting users …

One of the most controversial aspects of Facebook’s recent privacy upgrade downgrade has been the removal of the privacy setting allowing users to limit the visibility of their list of friends.
Perhaps more than any other set of information on Facebook, one’s social graph (the technical term for one’s network of friends) has the appearance of being non-personal information. It’s just a list of friends, after all. But numerous studies have shown the power of using social graphs to re-identify people in “anonymous” datasets, determine an individual’s sexual orientation, and so …

Recently I’ve commented on Facebook’s new privacy paradigm, and went so far to applaud Facebook’s promise to give users more specific control over individual posts, as well as the promise to simply its privacy settings.
My enthusiasm was tempered with skepticism (especially considering Facebook’s past privacy failures), as open questions remained about whether new default settings would be open or private, whether the touted recommendation system would suggest more strict or more lenient sharing of personal information, etc. At the end of the day, the laws of social networking dictate that …

Last week I commented on Facebook’s new privacy paradigm, which they said would launch “in the next couple of weeks”. Seems that process is starting today. Here is Facebook’s spin:
Facebook Asks More Than 350 Million Users Around the World To Personalize Their Privacy
Setting a new standard in user control, Facebook announced today that it is calling on its more than 350 million users to review and update their privacy settings—a first among major Internet services. In addition, Facebook will be rolling out easy-to-use tools to empower people to personalize control …

Facebook recently announced significant changes to how information will flow on the social network, impacting users’ privacy in both positive and (potentially) negative ways.
First, the good news: as hinted back in June, Facebook will be implementing a new feature giving users more control to specify the relative visibility of each bit of information they publish.
Currently, when you click the “Share” button to publish your status, upload photos and videos, or share links, who gets to view that content is governed by settings tucked away under a cavalcade of menus (Settings …

Last year, as part of Milwaukee’s 2008 OneWebDay celebration, I posted guidelines to help users adjust their Facebook privacy settings. This has been one of the most visited pages on my blog.
Now that we’re getting ready for the 2009 OneWebDay event, I thought it would be prudent to update these guidelines. Updated instructions, and helpful tips, are provided below.
Thanks to Rebecca Hall, who again created a nice flier that you can download as a PDF here. Feel free to copy and distribute to your friends, family, students, neighbors, etc.

I’m a big fan of the New York Times Magazine’s weekly column, The Ethicist. I’m not a big fan, however, of the column’s namesake, Randy Cohen. He is often much too consequentialist for my liking, too simplistic is his ethical analyses, and his attempts to include humor in his responses typically fail (and are an unnecessary distraction from often very interesting ethical dilemmas).
That said, Cohen got it right this week. In an entry titled “A Facebook Teaching Moment”, the scenarior is about a teacher who has been “friended” by a …

Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release.
Recall that last fall, a group of researchers affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University released a dataset of Facebook profile information from an entire cohort (the class of 2009) of college students from “an anonymous, northeastern American university.” While the researchers took good …

Here is my First Law of Social Networking: social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information.
Social networks’ ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users sharing information about themselves, their lives, and their interests. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg confirms this point when he notes that “as long as the stream of information is constantly increasing, and as long as we’re doing our job… of pushing that forward, I think that’s….the best strategy for [Facebook]“. In short, the …

Putting it mildly, Facebook has done a terrible job dealing with the myriad of privacy issues inherent with its social networking platform (see, for example, News Feed, Beacon, and indirectly, the TOS debacle).
I have frequently called on Facebook to engage more directly with issues of privacy within their services, but Mark Zuckerberg simply doesn’t get it, and their Chief Privacy Officer has largely been absent at best, and irrelevant at worst.
But hope springs eternal.
Facebook has hired Timothy Sparapani, a privacy specialist from the American Civil Liberties Union, as its new …