Michael Zimmer.org

Again, the media suggests the “kids these days just don’t care about privacy” and that, thanks to online social networking, privacy as a value has disappeared.
This time, it’s Randall Stross at the NY Times, in a column “When Everyone’s a Friend, Is Anything Private?“:
Facebook has a chief privacy officer, but I doubt that the position will exist 10 years from now. That’s not because Facebook is hell-bent on stripping away privacy protections, but because the popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites has promoted the sharing of all things …

danah boyd illuminates an interesting privacy loophole in how Facebook allows users to view others’ photos. As she describes it:
A few days ago, Gilad’s eyes opened wide and he called me over to look at his computer. He was on Facebook and he had just discovered a privacy loophole. He had maximized his newsfeed to get as many photo-related bits as possible. As a result, he was regularly informed when his Friends commented on other people’s photos, including photos of people with whom he was not Friends or in the …

I’m spending the next few days at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists in San Francisco, and I’m looking forward to learning more about many of the ethical and policy issues confronted by archivists in an age of growing digitization and Web-based archival services.
This afternoon I had the pleasure of presenting on a panel titled “Values in Design: Defining a Privacy-Aware Model for Web Access to Archives,” organized by Nancy McCall, Archivist at Johns Hopkins University Medical Archives, and her colleague Phoebe …

Earlier this week, Technology Review ran a piece discussing the social networking site, Moli, which allows users to manage multiple identities through a common login, controlling who gets to see what aspect of their lives. I was quoted in the story (and blogged about it), expressing concern that Moli, while pitching themselves as privacy-friendly, might actually pose a greater threat to user privacy than sites like Facebook:
Given that I have less control over who can see my profile at Facebook, there is some information I’m simply not willing to share …

BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has circled the wagons and might be considered changes to their controversial new Facebook Ads platform:
In the wake of mounting criticism, Facebook executives are discussing changes to a controversial advertising tool that publicizes users’ Web activities outside of the popular social network. Alterations to the recently introduced Beacon system could be announced as early as Nov. 29, BusinessWeek.com has learned.
Executives of the three-year-old company were in deep talks over proposed changes late into the afternoon on Nov. 28, according to a person familiar with the …

Facebook recently announced Facebook Ads, an attempt to monetize the vast amount of user information that flows through the social networking site (something I warned about previously). Facebook Ads has three main components:

Social Ads: Allows marketers to target ads based on user profile data, and also places brand-related events within a user’s news feed. For example, if I rate or rent a video from Blockbuster.com, that off-site activity is noted in my Facebook mini-feed, along with an advertising message from Blockbuster.

Beacon: Provides a way for Facebook users to declare …

I am currently attending the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Montreal. Earlier today I had the pleasure of participating on a panel I co-organized with Anders Albrechtslund titled, “Ways Knowing Everything About Each Other: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 and Social Networking.”
Here are the first few paragraphs of my contribution:
Privacy and Surveillance in Web 2.0:
A study in Contextual Integrity, and the Emergence of “Netaveillance”
This talk is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear …

William McGeveran, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School, points to this troubling story about a Florida State professor who made each student read aloud his/her Facebook profie, which noted how “the girls [sic] whose hobby was “being slutty” was particularly embarrassed…”
A similar thing happened during a public event showcasing the final projects for class I taught a few years ago. One student’s project was to assess to privacy implications of social networking sites, so he printed out the Facebook page of each student in the class and distributed …

Remember last fall when Facebook got itself in all kinds of trouble for unilaterally creating and automatically activating “feeds” of its users’ changes to their profile pages? They scrambled to try to reign in this privacy-threatening feature, and promised to maintain an environment where users “have control over whom they shared [their] information with.”
How quickly they forget.
Fred Stuztman reports (and if you’re into social networking theory and not reading Fred’s blog, you’re missing out) that Facebook recently began exposing profiles to be indexed by Google. Fred writes:
Granted, profiles are still …

Library Juice posts a wonderful essay by Tracy Nectoux, a library student at UIUC, who was assigned to visit a bookstore and compare the atmosphere to a library’s atmosphere. I think it’s helpful to take the comparison one step further and include Google Book Search, along with patron privacy in the mix. Here’s a summary of some of Nectoux’s comparisons, with Google Book Search and privacy concerns added in by me (yellow background):

Libraries
…

MIT’s Technology Review has a brief article about advances in zoom technology for cellphone cameras. This adds a new dimension to the privacy and surveillance threats cellphone cameras pose.
We experienced a major advancement in camera zoom technology around the turn of the century, which spurred Warren & Brandeis to write their seminal article “The Right to Privacy.” As the sophistication of mobile and networked cameras continues to rise, what will our answer be?

I’ve been meaning to blog about the discussion at Concurring Opinions regarding the rise of “cyber-shaming” – the act of posting online elements of seemingly private conversations or events that you happened to overhear or witness. Examples include the posting of details of annoying cellphone calls overheard, uploading of cellphone camera images of men who expose themselves on subways, or blogs dedicated to posting stories and images of men who harrass women in public. New York City has recently announced that it will equip 911 emergency centers to receive digital …

The Economist has written a short piece on the theory of privacy as “contextual integrity” developed by my dissertation adviser, Helen Nissenbaum. The article focuses on efforts by John Mitchell, Adam Barth and Anupam Datta, all computer scientists at Stanford University, to turn the philosophical components of contextual integrity into formal expressions that can be incorporated into computer programs:
Contextual integrity, which was developed by Helen Nissenbaum of New York University, relies on four classes of variable. These are the context of a flow of information, the capacities in …

The theory of “privacy as contextual integrity” provides the tools for considering how the introduction of new technologies/practices within a particular context might disrupt norms of information flow, potentially threatening values of privacy, autonomy, or liberty. It is especially useful when considering subtle shifts in information flows that flirt with the boundaries between public & private spheres, such as driving along the highway, having your photo taken in public, or providing information on social network sites such as Facebook.
Another important sphere to consider within the framework of contextual integrity is …

There has been an interesting discussion on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list (and across the blogosphere) regarding the addition of feeds at Facebook and the nature of the reaction by its users. Many have criticized the reaction by Facebook users for being naive, arguing that if they knowingly placed personal information on their public profile, they have no “expectation of privacy,” and shouldn’t (can’t) complain that their privacy has been violated simply if Facebook provides a new way for others to find that information.
I disagree, and that’s where …