Discussions of social media platforms and their impact on communication, collaboration, sociability, privacy, and norms of information flow.
A story today on NPR's Morning Edition news program focused on the controversy surrounding Facebook’s recent privacy upgrade downgrade: "Groups Complain To FTC About Facebook Changes" My discussion with the reporter, Martin Kaste, covered most of the issues raised in…
Read More NPR: Groups Complain To FTC About Facebook Changes
One of the most controversial aspects of Facebook’s recent privacy upgrade downgrade has been the removal of the privacy setting allowing users to limit the visibility of their list of friends. Perhaps more than any other set of information on…
Read More Facebook Provides Some Control of Friends List Visibility, But Hides It
Recently I’ve commented on Facebook’s new privacy paradigm, and went so far to applaud Facebook’s promise to give users more specific control over individual posts, as well as the promise to simply its privacy settings. My enthusiasm was tempered with…
Read More Facebook’s Privacy Upgrade is a Downgrade for User Privacy
Last week I commented on Facebook’s new privacy paradigm, which they said would launch “in the next couple of weeks”. Seems that process is starting today. Here is Facebook’s spin: Facebook Asks More Than 350 Million Users Around the World…
Facebook recently announced significant changes to how information will flow on the social network, impacting users' privacy in both positive and (potentially) negative ways. First, the good news: as hinted back in June, Facebook will be implementing a new feature…
When I edited a special volume of First Monday on "Critical Perspectives of Web 2.0" I was lucky to have included a contribution by Trebor Scholz, which made an already good collection of papers even better. Scholz's article, "Market Ideology…
Read More The Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor
Last year, as part of Milwaukee's 2008 OneWebDay celebration, I posted guidelines to help users adjust their Facebook privacy settings. This has been one of the most visited pages on my blog. Now that we're getting ready for the 2009…
Read More How to Adjust your Facebook Privacy Settings – 2009 Edition
I'm a big fan of the New York Times Magazine's weekly column, The Ethicist. I'm not a big fan, however, of the column's namesake, Randy Cohen. He is often much too consequentialist for my liking, too simplistic is his ethical…
Read More The Ethicist Gets it Right with “A Facebook Teaching Moment”
I've returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was…
Read More Debrief: Computer Ethics/Philosophical Enquiry 2009 in Corfu, Greece
[UPDATE: The final paper has been published in Ethics and Information Technology]Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper…
Read More Draft Paper: “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook
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