Michael Zimmer.org

I recently had the pleasure and priviledge of joining Nancy Baym of the University of Kansas School of Communication Studies as a guest on Kansas City public radio’s daily current events show, “Up To Date“. The show’s topic was social networking sites, and our nearly hour-long discussion ranged what social networking sites are, how they work, why people use them, as well as the various the privacy, safety, and security issues that go along with online communities.
The podcast can be downloaded here (mp3).

I’m sitting in a hotel room in New Haven, trying to finish an article for First Monday, but then I received a call from my wife suggesting I turn on PBS, as Frontline is airing an amazing report on “Growing Up Online.” It is a thoughtful treatment of the topic that, in their words, “takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood.”
The show’s website has some nice supporting material, including a discussion of how many …

Following recent announcements by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, MySpace has announced it will begin targeting advertisements based on users profiles and behavior on their social networking platform. As explained in this NYTimes article:
The algorithms make their judgments partly on certain keywords in the profile. A member might be obvious by describing himself as a financial information enthusiast, for example. But more than likely the clues are more subtle. He might qualify for that category by listing Donald Trump as a hero, Fortune magazine as a favorite publication or “Wall …

[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz]
This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. After presenting a few examples of unintended consequences of Web 2.0 that bear on privacy and surveillance, I will introduce the term “netaveillance,” which might provide a useful concept around which a more robust theory of …

Increasingly, policy are regularly monitoring MySpace pages for evidence of criminal activity. Here’s a recent case from near my hometown, as reported in a column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
The 18-year-old Sheboygan guy was so proud of the pot plants he was growing in his basement that he posted pictures of them on two different Web sites, including MySpace.com.
The caption under one of them:
“My Mary Jane that’s growin in my closet right now ahah.”He was also generous enough to post a picture of himself and his friends flashing gang signs …

Discourse.net discovered Fake Your Space, a service that for just 99 cents per month will provide users of MySpace and Facebook fake “hot” friends with custom messages. In their own words:
FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you …

Trent Lapinski, a freelance writer, was hired to write an exposé about MySpace, but apparently News Corp threatened to sue his publisher if they ran the story. Instead, Lapinski sold his story to Valleywag, who decided to publish it despite the threat of legal action. Why doesn’t News Corp want it published? Probably becuase Lapinski concludes that MySpace is nothing but the next generation of spyware & spam: Spam 2.0. Here’s excerpts from the condensed version:
1. MySpace is NOT a viral success. MySpace was advertised on mass levels to reach …

Recalling past issues surrounding MySpace’s terms of service claiming ownership of user’s uploaded content, it appears YouTube has updated their TOS with similar language. See the discussion at BoingBoing.

A pretty simple example of how your personal information can be scrubbed from social sites, a teen finds out that someone stole her MySpace photos for use on their own profile:

Katie got a call from a friend who stumbled across a stranger’s Myspace page… But who she saw was no stranger… It was Katie… Someone had stolen her photos and started using them as their own.
“I nearly feel over that that was my main picture and they were using it as their main picture.”
…”Just be careful you never know who …

Not content with the “limited scope” of collecting phone records on every citizen, the NSA wants to start mining personal data from social networking sites like MySpace, coupled with the intelligence of the semantic web, to help build even stronger profiles of individuals. From the New Scientist report:
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically …

The Boston Globe has a story today about plagiarism in blogs. I’ve previously commented on blog plagiarism – blogiarism – in terms of stealing content in order to drive readers to your site to capitalize on advertising revenue. The Globe’s story, however, addresses a different motivation for online plagiarism – personal blog plagiarism, where someone actually takes personal content and pretends it’s from their own life:
Last month, an alert reader informed Beth that her blog was being plagiarized. Dozens of Beth’s blog entries had been stolen, word-for-word, over six …

The Register reports on shifting MySpace terms of service which could mean that content posted by teenagers today might show up on the front page of the New York Post 10 years from now.
Originally, the MySpace ToS granted the website a limited license that give the it non-exclusive rights to use the material users display there, but only while they keep it there. If a user deletes the data, MySpace no longer has any rights to it (if they happened to keep an archived copy). But soon after MySpace …

Chris Hoofnagle is attending the Ad:Tech San Francisco conferences on new advertising technologies, where he has found “several trends that have serious privacy implications.” Among these is the gathering data from social networking sites like Friendster and Myspace for marketing and advertising. Chris quotes from an article covering the conference that notes matter-of-factly how “Internet social networks like MySpace.com and blogging phenomenon are creating millions of self-reported consumer profiles for potential targeting of products and services.” Scary stuff.
Chris also reveals how values can be embedded (or not embedded) in …