Pre-class Discussion for Jan 15

Questions for Chris Kelly

• (from Question tool): With Facebook opening up to anyone (instead of being closed to certain (i.e. educational) networks), what are you doing to avoid/mitigate some of the privacy and security issues that have been encountered on MySpace?
• (from Question tool): Is facebook's commercial strengths/strategy lying more in providing the best features/development platform to attract users or aggregating/analyzing the most information about users for better advertising monetization?

Firefox Workaround to Block Facebook Beacon

Here's a workaround for Firefox that I received a few days into this drama that lets you block Facebook beacon. Jumpingdeeps 10:15, 13 January 2008 (EST)

• I'm pretty sure that now there is a global opt-out option for this in the Facebook privacy settings, but according to one of our articles for today, even with this setting turned on, "information about your habits on these third party sites are still sent along with your e-mail address to Facebook." I'm not sure if this workaround blocks these as well? --NikaE 20:29, 14 January 2008 (EST)
  • The workaround website seems to suggest that you are preventing the partner site from sending requests to Facebook beacon, meaning Facebook actually doesn't get any information about you. Now I'm sure Facebook can get around this by changing/making opaque how these requests are sent to it...but that would be evil! (j/k) Jumpingdeeps 20:54, 14 January 2008 (EST)

Facebook Responds to Privacy Concerns

• I think one of the most important points to take away from this is that default settings matter. When the default on Facebook was to have Beacon as an opt-out service, there were many stories of users who hadn't even noticed pop-up windows asking whether they wanted their purchase to be reported on Facebook. As a result, some holiday presents that users had bought for their friends appeared in those same friends' Facebook news feeds. Thus, the opt-out default turned out to cause real problems. Even though Facebook has changed many of their policies regarding Beacon, in order to entirely opt out of the service one must affirmatively change their Facebook settings and state that they never want their activity on outside websites reported to Facebook. I get the sense that if Beacon was introduced entirely as an opt-in feature, almost no average users would change their privacy settings to allow outside websites to sometimes post their behavior on Facebook. Clearly, default settings matter. --NikaE 20:15, 14 January 2008 (EST)

Privacy as Censorship

• This article makes the claim that government databases pose much greater threats to the public than private databases. However, in Prof. Zittrain's book, he points out that the Privacy Act of 1974 applied a set of fair information practices to government agencies' records, but "Congress never enacted a comparable comprehensive regulatory scheme for private databases." Even if government records pose the potential for more harm to the public, could the lack of regulation of private databases in reality pose a greater threat? --NikaE 20:19, 14 January 2008 (EST)
• Singleton is very concerned with free speech, and worries that private institutions' right to free speech will be stifled if they are not allowed to freely share database information with third parties. However, isn't there a very real chance that free expression among the general public can be stifled if their information is indiscrimanately shared among third parties? For example, a person may be less willing to sign a petition if they worry that their contact information will be sold to telemarketers. Hasn't this person's free speech right been infringed upon? Are we willing to sacrifice this right in order to preserve the right of companies to exchange database information? --NikaE 20:25, 14 January 2008 (EST)
• Pardon my haven't-taken-a-class-on-it-so-am-confused question: Do corporations and businesses have free speech rights? Wikipedia weighs in on Corporate Personhood. Jumpingdeeps 20:40, 14 January 2008 (EST)
• My biggest concern with this article, though, was that it didn't seem to ever really address the problems of databases that are perfectly indexed and searchable, even if they're not available to the general public. The article kind of skated over this, stating that even if "Mrs. Jones" lives in a small town, "the employees of the creator of the database usually will not live anywhere close by." If even one employee does, and is even slightly curious about Mrs. Jones, he can easily find out a lot of things about her simply by using his access to the database. Furthermore, private organizations often inadvertently make private data available (Prof. Zittrain points to several banks and credit card agencies that have done so), and once this happens, the easy searchability of the database becomes a really big problem. Ultimately, a database is more than just discreet gossip about individuals. Information can be easily picked out of it by those who have interest in that information. For example, there has been a rumor (I'm not sure if it's substantiated or not) that Facebook employees can see which users view other users' profiles. Operating under the assumption that this is true, for the great majority of Facebook users, who do not know Facebook employees, this is not really of any consequence to them. However, for the few users that employees take an interest in, this could be very concerning. Furthermore, employees presumably don't have to sort through every log of every user, but are able to find what they want through a simple, automated search. The searchability of databases, not the databases themselves, are more concerning from a privacy perspective, and I'm not sure that Singleton takes this argument on squarely. --NikaE 20:46, 14 January 2008 (EST)