Discussions of social media platforms and their impact on communication, collaboration, sociability, privacy, and norms of information flow.
I was recently asked by the campus newspaper to comment on a new Facebook application called CampusBuddy. Utilizing grading records from 250 public colleges and universities nationwide (public schools generally are legally obligated to release their grades upon request), CampusBuddy…
Read More CampusBuddy: Aggregating Campus Grading Data on Facebook
Over the past few days I have been attending the 9th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in Copenhagen. This year's conference is "Internet Research 9.0 - Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place", and it has been expertly organized…
[NOTE: This post has been updated here.] For Milwaukee's OneWebDay celebration, we provided students instructions to help them adjust their privacy settings on Facebook. It seems that while Facebook does provide many controls for users to manage the flow of…
Speaking of privacy on social networking sites, the Dutch 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology is holding a 2-day conference later this month on Privacy in Social Network Sites. I know the organizers of this event well, and they are asking…
(See my update at the bottom of the post, as well as Fred Stutzman's thoughtful analysis) As mentioned the other day, a group of researchers from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University released a dataset of…
Read More More On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset – It’s Harvard College (Updated)
(Updated below with responses to comments by Jason Kaufman, one of the lead researchers on this project) (Another update: I'm pretty sure the "anonymous, Northeastern university" from where this dataset was derived is Harvard College. Details here) A group of…
Read More On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset (Updated)
Remember Beacon? That a pervasive tool Facebook created for tracking, collecting, and publishing user purchasing habits across the Web? After enough uproar, Facebook was kind enough to offer users a way to opt-out of this surveillance assemblage. Well, I was…
Read More Facebook *Really* Wants You to Use Beacon (Updated)
There's nothing worse than listening to yourself talk. Following up on March's special issue of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0,” I was recently interviewed by Joy Austria and A.J. Hannah for the First Monday Podcast series. You…
Read More First Monday Podcast: The Faustian Bargain with Web 2.0
Social network services are increasingly being used in legal and criminal investigations. Google's social networking site Orkut, which is immensely popular in Brazil, is no exception. In 2006, I commented on Google's decision to comply with a Brazilian court order…
Read More Google to “systematically” provide data on suspect Orkut users to Brazilian authorities
David Faser points to an article in the Times Online that throws a bunch of softball questions at Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer. Facebook has been at the center of multiple violations of user privacy, and all the Times…
Read More Real Questions for Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer
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