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…
Read More Why Pete Warden Should Not Release Profile Data on 215 Million Facebook Users
While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was ethical for researchers to follow and systematically capture public Twitter streams without first obtaining…
Read More Is it Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts without Consent?
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…
Read More Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research
To celebrate Data Privacy Day, Google has published its 5 guiding privacy principles. The principles are something every organization should commit to and strive for. The problem is, Google hasn't adhered to them quite as closely as they'd want you to believe....
January 28, 2010 is Data Privacy Day. To celebrate, MichaelZimmer.org no longer uses any services that rely on web cookies or web bugs...
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.
Microsoft has fired a new salvo into the search privacy wars, announcing it will delete IP addresses from the Bing search engine logs after 6 months. Microsoft has decided to take the lead in search privacy and agree to the European Union’s demand that data retention be cut to six months. Previously, Microsoft de-identified its search logs immediately, but didn’t purge the IP address until 18 months. Now, de-identification still takes place immediately, and the IP addresses are completely removed in 6 months.
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:…
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...
[UPDATE: As of Jan 7, 2010, Google has now changed its homepage so the Nexus One ad fades in with the other content -- more below] Remember how hard we gad to fight to convince Google to include a link…
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