Privacy Debate Hits Close to Home (and We Have the Pictures to Prove It!)
Online privacy is an issue that has consistently found its way into the headlines.
Last month it was Facebook's Beacon application that had Internet users up in arms. The immensely popular social network seemed to be catering to advertisers without an easy, or apparent, opt-out for its users. Berkman Fellow David Weinberger catalogued the techniques employed by Facebook in a post where he surmised that,
"Facebook is getting privacy right where privacy is taken as a matter of information transfer. But it is getting privacy wrong as a norm. Our expectation is that our transactions at one site are neither to be made known to other sites nor made known to our friends. We may well want to let our friends know what we've bought, but the norm and expectation is that we will not. Software defaults generally ought to reflect the social defaults. And when you're as important as Facebook — two billion page views a day — your software's defaults can nudge the social defaults."
With the outpouring of complaints that followed the disclosure of Facebook's information gathering, changes were rapidly made. StopBadware.org – a Berkman Center project that serves as a "neighborhood watch" for malware online – reported on these changes, while cautioning that not all issues were resolved and that they hoped Facebook would become "a leader in user privacy."
Just today, with Google's announcement of their Street View function encompassing Boston (and Cambridge too!), privacy flags immediately went up. Concerns have been voiced since the imaging became available, yet the uses and mashup possibilities have led the company to continue undeterred with their ever-growing image cataloging.
The solution to sharing and controlling just the right amount of our digital identity is something we will continue to grapple with, but as the standards employed online are developed we all benefit from remaining involved and alert to the possible threats to not only our comfort online, but also our safety.
You can read more on the issues surrounding online privacy by visiting the Citizen Media Law Project's Privacy category to see court cases, current events, and more on this evolving debate.
The recently published case study by Urs Gasser and John Palfrey on digital identity is also available online.
Last month it was Facebook's Beacon application that had Internet users up in arms. The immensely popular social network seemed to be catering to advertisers without an easy, or apparent, opt-out for its users. Berkman Fellow David Weinberger catalogued the techniques employed by Facebook in a post where he surmised that,
"Facebook is getting privacy right where privacy is taken as a matter of information transfer. But it is getting privacy wrong as a norm. Our expectation is that our transactions at one site are neither to be made known to other sites nor made known to our friends. We may well want to let our friends know what we've bought, but the norm and expectation is that we will not. Software defaults generally ought to reflect the social defaults. And when you're as important as Facebook — two billion page views a day — your software's defaults can nudge the social defaults."
With the outpouring of complaints that followed the disclosure of Facebook's information gathering, changes were rapidly made. StopBadware.org – a Berkman Center project that serves as a "neighborhood watch" for malware online – reported on these changes, while cautioning that not all issues were resolved and that they hoped Facebook would become "a leader in user privacy."
Just today, with Google's announcement of their Street View function encompassing Boston (and Cambridge too!), privacy flags immediately went up. Concerns have been voiced since the imaging became available, yet the uses and mashup possibilities have led the company to continue undeterred with their ever-growing image cataloging.
The solution to sharing and controlling just the right amount of our digital identity is something we will continue to grapple with, but as the standards employed online are developed we all benefit from remaining involved and alert to the possible threats to not only our comfort online, but also our safety.
You can read more on the issues surrounding online privacy by visiting the Citizen Media Law Project's Privacy category to see court cases, current events, and more on this evolving debate.
The recently published case study by Urs Gasser and John Palfrey on digital identity is also available online.