Michael Zimmer.org

In response to recent Facebook privacy fiascoes — the privacy upgrade downgrade and inevitable backtracking, Zuckerberg’s (and other exec’s) various ill-informed remarks, etc, etc — I’ve co-authored an op-ed with Chris Hoofnagle, the director of information privacy programs at the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law & Technology, where we criticize Facebook’s “perfection of privacy public relations.”

The piece appears in The Huffington Post, and is titled “How to Win Friends and Manipulate People”. Here’s an excerpt:

These events represent the perfection of privacy public relations. Guided by earlier battles fought by tobacco and drug companies, information-intensive firms have learned how to use rhetoric to distract the public while successfully implementing new programs. They are the Machiavellis of privacy.

GigaOm highlights an interview with Nancy Baym, associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas and author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age, on the limitations in Facebook’s approach to privacy.
The interview covers various important issues, but Baym’s main concern is that Facebook has a “fundamentally naive and Utopian” view of what privacy means online, stemming  from the fact that the company is run by “a bunch of computer science and engineering undergrads who don’t know anything about human relationships.”
I agree. I …

By now, this series of events is very familiar:

Facebook launches new “feature” with little or no warning
Feature is automatically activated for millions of users
Users get confused and angry
Backlash and criticism occurs; users threaten to leave
Zuckerberg blogs that he has listened, tells you everyone really wants to share everything, but in the end backtracks a bit

This happened with NewsFeed, Beacon, changes to Facebook’s terms of service, and so on. And it happened again today.
Amid the rising criticism about recent changes, Facebook announced new privacy settings and practices, promising users more, …

On Sunday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence regarding the most recent spate of privacy problems with his social networking service, and published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings.”

I finally got around to giving it a close reading today, and my initial reaction was visceral — it pissed me off. In just over 500 words, Zuckerberg succeeded in sounding condescending, bragging about things Facebook can’t really brag about, and over-simplifying the core issues at hand. But in the end this doesn’t matter, because I don’t even think Facebook’s 400 million users were the intended audience.

Last Friday (May 21, 2010), I had the great pleasure of being a guest on Science Friday, the weekly science and technology show hosted by Ira Flatow, airing live each Friday on NPR’s popular Talk of the Nation radio show. The show’s topic was Protecting Your Privacy On Social Networking Sites, and I was joined by Rich Mogull of Securosis, and Kevin Underhill, a lawyer and author of the “Lowering The Bar” blog.
You can listen to the entire show, and read the transcript, here. (Apologies for any …

The May 31st Time magazine cover story is on Facebook and privacy. It is pretty much a straight recap of recent privacy issues and debacles surrounding the social networking company. Nothing all that new.
But one passage caught my eye (emphasis added):
Zuckerberg believes that most people want to share more about themselves online. He’s almost paternalistic in describing the trend. “The way that people think about privacy is changing a bit,” he says. “What people want isn’t complete privacy. It isn’t that they want secrecy. It’s …

In Facebook’s vice president for public policy Elliot Schrage’s infamous Q&A session with the New York Times readers, he made this statement:
The privacy implications of our ads, unfortunately, appear to be widely misunderstood. People assume we’re sharing or even selling data to advertisers. We’re not. We have no intention of doing so. If an advertiser targets someone interested in boats, we’ll serve ad impressions to people with ‘boats’ on their profile somewhere. However, we don’t provide the advertiser any names or other personal …

(Updated to include LinkedIn)
Given the recent focus on increasing numbers of users deleting their Facebook accounts due to the recent privacy disaster, and some of the past barriers that made it hard to accomplish at all, I decided to perform a comparison of the relative ease/difficulty of deleting one’s account on some popular websites: Amazon, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, MSN, MySpace, Twitter, and Yahoo.
While you shouldn’t expect closing an account to be an easy task (they don’t want to encourage it), it shouldn’t be painfully difficult, either. In the end, closing …

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has a history of speaking his mind on privacy, and what he speaks is often fraught with problems, ignorance, and arrogance. But, today, I found a new statement that brings Zuckerberg’s hubris to a new level: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

According to Zuckerberg, the person responsible for the world’s most popular website for sharing information about oneself, wanting to manage your flows of information in such a way that might present a different version of your “complete” self to your friends, family, co-workers, and more distant friends shows a lack of integrity.

Zuckerberg must have skipped that class where Jung and Goffman were discussed…

In an attempt to stem the rising outrage over its most recent round of privacy failures — Instant Personalization & Connections — Facebook’s vice president for public policy, Elliot Schrage, answered readers questions at The New York Times’s Bits blog. As with other corporate expressions of Facebook’s approach to privacy, his answers reveal a gross misunderstanding of the nature of privacy in our (social) networked world.

Like many, I am considering leaving Facebook due to its most recent round of privacy failures — Instant Personalization & Connections — which represent only the latest in a continuing de-evolution of privacy protection on the popular social networking platform.
But what will happen if I remove data from my profile, or delete my account altogether?
Facebook’s Privacy Policy notes the following in section 7. How You Can Change or Remove Information:
Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may …

While my Freedom of Information Act request to the Library of Congress requesting a copy of its agreement with Twitter remains unanswered, interviews with Library personnel at The American Prospect and Ars Technica provide us some insight into the nature of the agreement and the plans for the data.

Today’s announcement that the Library of Congress will be archiving all public tweets since March 2006 prompts many questions. But most people, I suspect, are comfortable with the concept since the LOC is only archiving public tweets; those who decided to restrict the visibility of their Twitter traffic can rest assured that their chatter won’t be included in this mass collection of public utterances.
Or can they?
Consider this scenario:

You decide to protect your privacy/visibility and keep your tweet stream protected.
I send a request to follow you. You accept. I now receive …

The Library of Congress tweeted today that they are acquiring the entire archive of public Twitter activity since March 2006.

While the LOC stresses that they’re doing this for historical and scholarly reasons, there are major implications regarding the privacy and contextual expectations of Twitter users. Now, suddenly, all their tweets are being archived by the world’s largest library. Yes, the tweets were always public and discoverable, but the searchability and accessibility will increase drastically if/when the LOC processes this archive.

Due to these concerns, there are some vital questions that must be addressed prior to implementing such an expansive archive of public Twitter activity.

I am pleased to announce that I’ve joined a diverse coalition of privacy groups, think tanks, technology companies, and fellow academics in an effort to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to better reflect the realities of modern communication technologies. One of the primary federal electronic privacy and surveillance laws, EPCA is in dire need of an upgrade: it was originally passed in 1986, before the World Wide Web was invented and when the number of American cell phone users numbered in the tens of thousands rather …