Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a digital privacy and data ethics scholar at Marquette University
I recently had the pleasure and priviledge of joining Nancy Baym of the University of Kansas School of Communication Studies as a guest on Kansas City public radio's daily current events show, "Up To Date". The show's topic was social…
Read More KCUR Podcast: Social Networking Sites – How they Work, Privacy and Safety
I'm sitting in a hotel room in New Haven, trying to finish an article for First Monday, but then I received a call from my wife suggesting I turn on PBS, as Frontline is airing an amazing report on "Growing…
Following recent announcements by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, MySpace has announced it will begin targeting advertisements based on users profiles and behavior on their social networking platform. As explained in this NYTimes article: The algorithms make their judgments partly…
Read More Panoptic Sorting on the Rise as MySpace Enters Behavioral Targeting Foray
[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz] This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts…
Increasingly, policy are regularly monitoring MySpace pages for evidence of criminal activity. Here's a recent case from near my hometown, as reported in a column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The 18-year-old Sheboygan guy was so proud of the pot…
Discourse.net discovered Fake Your Space, a service that for just 99 cents per month will provide users of MySpace and Facebook fake "hot" friends with custom messages. In their own words: FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal…
Trent Lapinski, a freelance writer, was hired to write an exposé about MySpace, but apparently News Corp threatened to sue his publisher if they ran the story. Instead, Lapinski sold his story to Valleywag, who decided to publish it despite…
Recalling past issues surrounding MySpace's terms of service claiming ownership of user's uploaded content, it appears YouTube has updated their TOS with similar language. See the discussion at BoingBoing.
A pretty simple example of how your personal information can be scrubbed from social sites, a teen finds out that someone stole her MySpace photos for use on their own profile: Katie got a call from a friend who stumbled…
Not content with the "limited scope" of collecting phone records on every citizen, the NSA wants to start mining personal data from social networking sites like MySpace, coupled with the intelligence of the semantic web, to help build even stronger…
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