Discussions of social media platforms and their impact on communication, collaboration, sociability, privacy, and norms of information flow.
Here is my First Law of Social Networking: social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information. Social networks' ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users…
Read More The Laws of Social Networking: Promote Open Flows of Information, Make Privacy Hard
Speaking of Lessig, two interesting cases emerged this week that help illustrate Lessig's position that, when thinking about the architecture of cyberspace, "code is law." In Code, Lessig argues that all of the rules, tendencies, affordances, and constraints of/in cyberspace…
A few months ago I contributed to a news article about businesses increasingly participating in social media platforms for marketing and management of customer relations. Seems the recording industry behemoth Universal Music Group was listening, as they've recently joined the…
Read More Universal Music Group on Tumblr: Social Marketing Gone Wrong
Putting it mildly, Facebook has done a terrible job dealing with the myriad of privacy issues inherent with its social networking platform (see, for example, News Feed, Beacon, and indirectly, the TOS debacle). I have frequently called on Facebook to…
Read More Facebook Hires ACLU Privacy Lawyer, Might Actually Address Privacy
Amateur facial recognition technology is coming to Facebook. Face.com is launching a facial recognition application called Photo Finder to allow Facebook users to search their photos -- and photos of their friends -- to learn, recognize, and tag familiar faces.…
Read More Photo Finder: Automated Facial Recognition on Facebook
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…
Sometime last year, I discovered a Facebook application named "Privacy" that provided insight into the personal information any application can access when a user adds one to their Facebook profile. The application prodded users to be concerned about how much…
Read More What Happened to the Facebook Application “Privacy”?
We are frequently confronted with examples and rhetoric that people's stated privacy preferences don't match up with what they do in practice. For example, see Adam Thierer's recent post, where he provides thoughts from Nick Carr, Bruce Schneier, and Jim…
Read More Privacy Trade-offs: Do People Not Care, or Simply Not Know?
After reverting to its old terms of service in the face of increasing criticism, Facebook has followed up on its promise to give users "a lot of input in crafting" the next version of the social networking giant's TOS. Today,…
A Milwaukee-area school district has enacted a policy banning communication between school staff and students on social networking Web sites and instant messaging services. According to this report, the school board seems to be concerned over the fact they can't…
Read More School Bans Teacher-Student Communication on Social Networks
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