This year, I am the interim director of the undergraduate program at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. While the School's largest program is the MLIS degree, our bachelor of science degree has been growing, improving,…
Read More UW-M SOIS Announces New Name for Undergraduate Degree
Recently I've found myself absorbed in various issues surrounding Internet research ethics: the Tastes, Ties, and Time Facebook data release, Pete Warden's plans to release a database of public Facebook information on 215 million users, etc. To help work through…
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,…
Read More Baym: Facebook’s Views on Privacy are “Fundamentally Naive and Utopian”
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…
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.…
Read More Science Friday: Protecting Your Privacy On Social Networking Sites
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…
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…
Read More Facebook (and others) Shares Identifiable Information with Advertisers
Recently we learned that Google's Street View vehicles gathered people's private communications on their home WiFi networks as they drove by snapping photos. Initially, Google denied it was collecting or storing any payload data, but later admitted that it had, in…
Read More Google on Wi-Fi Privacy Invasions: “No Harm, No Foul”
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