Social networking, privacy, and potential implications for the offline world
In the US, if there’s a question about whether your privacy has been violated, something that affects the case is whether you had a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
This is important when it comes to a two part test regarding whether “whether a police or government search is subject to the limitations of the Fourth Amendment: (1) governmental action must contravene an individual's actual, subjective expectation of privacy; (2) and that expectation of privacy must be reasonable, in the sense that society in general would recognize it as such.
To meet the first part of the test, the person from whom the information was obtained must demonstrate that they, in fact, had an actual, subjective expectation that the evidence obtained would not be available to the public. In other words, the person asserting that a search was conducted must show that they kept the evidence in a manner designed to ensure its privacy.
The first part of the test is related to the notion "in plain view". If a person did not undertake reasonable efforts to conceal something from a casual observer (as opposed to a snoop), then no subjective expectation of privacy is assumed. [7]
The second part of the test is analyzed objectively: would society at large deem a person's expectation of privacy to be reasonable? If it is plain that a person did not keep the evidence at issue in a private place, then no search is required to uncover the evidence. For example, there is generally no search when police officers look through garbage because a reasonable person would not expect that items placed in the garbage would necessarily remain private.” (Quote from Wikipedia)
Y’all are smart and can probably see the direction (or -a- direction) this is going with regard to social networking, especially with the various bouts of anger aimed at Facebook for disrespectful treatment of users’ data and privacy settings, for the massive heap of legal trouble dear old Google got into with its massive, lawsuitastic fuckup with Buzz, and various and sundry other sites doing smaller scale things.
So it is deeply, deeply troubling to me that the current major players in creating massive social networking tools are requiring, with varying degrees of enforcement, people to display a “real” name, and in Google’s case, with Google+, forcing users to pick a gender (from offensively limited choices; no, they don’t deserve a cookie for merely providing “Other” as the only alternative to Female and Male) - which, the last I heard, would always be displayed publicly.
Have they learned nothing about gender options from what other social sites have gone through? This is not a new problem.
And also: Have they learned absolutely nothing - from, say, their own experiences with Buzz - about why making gender public is a problem due to harassment on the internets? In particular, how it can, unfortunately, be irritating to dangerous for a person to be identified as female? (Not to mention the very long history of women using pseudonyms, or first initial last name, in order to be taken seriously as authors.)
Lastly, if they are so keen on making it easy for you to limit which of your contacts sees which updates - why so strongly intent on the “real name” bullshit? If they understand that the updates you want your closest friends to see are NOT necessarily what you want your casual acquaintances to see, or your biofamily, why do they not understand that you might want to identify yourself to the two groups using completely different names? And that letting you list all the names you are known by does not solve the problem?
I’ve read a few discussions about the “real” name issue, and I’m horrified by the few comments I’ve seen to the effect that people need to “get over” privacy. (And had many, many eye rolling moments to the many, many, “I hate fake names, real names are bestest” comments. Also of note: on one such discussion I started counted the people in favor of "real" names - and stopped when I realized I had 44 who were apparently men, and only 6 who were apparently women. CLEARLY, making gender publicly known is not at all sexist, just like so many men explain elsewhere.)
All in all, I do not understand the rush to jump on the Google+ bandwagon.
I mean, I get that it’s a shiny new toy, and lots of people are looking at Facebook the way people used to look at MySpace (like it’s only what stupid children who don't "get" the internet would use *eyeroll* *scoff*), and it’s by invitation only, which increases the Oooh Want factor, and Google still manages to have some sort of shinyhappyTRUSTUS appeal, but really? Y’all trust *Google* with this information? In some cases more than Facebook? Why? Why do you think Google will successfully solve the problems that exist with Facebook?
Facebook, for all its faults, tracks the information you put on Facebook (and whatever other services you link to it). If you have a Google account, and you use it as much as you possibly can because Google Is Awesome, then Google tracks: your searches, your email, your contacts, your calendar, your documents, and everything you do on your Android phone. ETA: Plus I forgot Google maps and Google checkout. And now, if you’re using the social networking thing, they have all your interactions with your friends and family. Besides figuring out how to best advertise to you, and doing various nerdy analytics, what else are they doing with it? How long are they storing it? How secure is it from being hacked? How much of it are they sharing with the government - and, um, which governments - and under what circumstances?
Do you really have the privacy you believe you do?
If you’ve got the time, reading parts of this collection of articles about social networking might be interesting. Protecting Online Privacy is a nice piece that indicates that actually, people DO still care about privacy, despite being willing to talk openly about some things that seem like they “should” be private.
From the article: Privacy is about the fact that you have a choice in what you reveal and that you exercise the choice knowingly. . .
But the kind of control anyone can exert by tweaking privacy settings is minimal. Through a combination of weak policies, poor public discussion, and some remarkable inventions, including social networking services and mobile smartphones with cameras, we have less and less control over our reputations every day. That doesn't mean we want less control. But as long as we are held accountable for youthful indiscretions that potential employers or customs agents can easily google, our opportunities for social, intellectual, and actual mobility are limited. And we are denied second chances.
.. . controlling our use of social network sites is only the beginning. Over time, we all must develop social norms that punish bullies who expose private people to ridicule and public humiliation. Beyond that, we should work to establish strong laws that protect the vast majority of us who don't have the skill, time, attention, or awareness to constantly manage our online profiles and multiple reputations. At the very least, companies that make money from harvesting our personal preferences should have to ask us to opt in to these systems of surveillance with all the costs and benefits clearly disclosed. If allowing Facebook and Google the ability to track and store our most personal information will give us better service in return, let's make these companies convince us to enter such a deal. As of now, few of us even comprehend the extent to which we are tracked and studied for the benefit of these companies.
[emphasis mine]
I trust Google far, far less than I trust Facebook, because Google permeates the web so thoroughly, and because they have a long history of tracking and storing everything they possibly can, for reasons that are not clear. They've made some massive errors, and they are controlling things in a top-down manner that pushes my anti-authoritarian buttons in all the wrong ways (I understand that in some ways, they are legally bound to some restrictions, like restricting access to people above a certain age).
I am also uninterested in using a service that claims it wants to give people privacy, and then forces people to choose between violating the rules or risking their own safety.
Not to mention crap like telling people “Use the name you are known by, unless your last name is Cock, or if the name you are known by isn’t what we think of as a ‘real’ name.” I’m sure they’ll work out some of those individual cases, but the policy is, in general, in my not-at-all humble opinion, a heaping pile of dingos’ kidneys, and it stinks. The notion that people will only be nice to each other if they use “real” names is completely ridiculous, as is suggesting people provide evidence of official documentation of the name you submit. Or is Google our new government? (Not that Google is wholly consistent with whether pseudonyms are okay or not.)
Meanwhile, if you want more privacy - or at least some semblance of it - Minigroup claims that group interactions are always private to the group, never indexed by search engines, and various other good things (how trustworthy is this organization? How secure is it? I don’t know), SecretSocial lets you hold conversations that are never stored on disk, and are deleted when you are done with the conversation, and - still in alpha - diaspora is being built from the ground up to provide better control over your data than Facebook. ETA: If you want an alternative to Google's search, DuckDuckGo seems like a good one. They claim to neither track you nor filter results based on your search history.
As a free, open source, and distributed network, diaspora probably has the best chance of providing the kind of privacy and security that people want. There’s no one overlord forcing people to use “real” names, and gender is an optional text box. Here's a nice list of good requirements for social networking, which might be amusing to use to compare the various options.
I’ve got an account on the diaspora pod maintained here, but I don’t know of anyone else out there on any pod - if you want to try it out, drop me a note and I’ll tell you how to look me up (I'm searchable by my real name, for starters). Creating an account is super easy. (Different pods are at different levels of development, depending on what work the maintainers are doing; at this point, you can export data, but there's not yet a way to import it, so moving to different servers - pods - is not easy. The plan eventually is to make it easy for anyone to host their own pod. Again, diaspora as a whole is in alpha.) Privit.us has Facebook, Twitter, and tumblr integration; other pods may or may not.
In the meantime, if you're on Google+, here's a "useful but hard-to-find privacy feature that is disabled by default." Apparently Google's learned a few awesome tricks from Facebook about making privacy controls easy to find.
ETA one more link: If you upload photos to Google's photo service, Google can use those photos however it likes. But who cares about copyright when you get unlimited storage, amiright?
Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/512518.html. Pick your poison and comment there.
This is important when it comes to a two part test regarding whether “whether a police or government search is subject to the limitations of the Fourth Amendment: (1) governmental action must contravene an individual's actual, subjective expectation of privacy; (2) and that expectation of privacy must be reasonable, in the sense that society in general would recognize it as such.
To meet the first part of the test, the person from whom the information was obtained must demonstrate that they, in fact, had an actual, subjective expectation that the evidence obtained would not be available to the public. In other words, the person asserting that a search was conducted must show that they kept the evidence in a manner designed to ensure its privacy.
The first part of the test is related to the notion "in plain view". If a person did not undertake reasonable efforts to conceal something from a casual observer (as opposed to a snoop), then no subjective expectation of privacy is assumed. [7]
The second part of the test is analyzed objectively: would society at large deem a person's expectation of privacy to be reasonable? If it is plain that a person did not keep the evidence at issue in a private place, then no search is required to uncover the evidence. For example, there is generally no search when police officers look through garbage because a reasonable person would not expect that items placed in the garbage would necessarily remain private.” (Quote from Wikipedia)
Y’all are smart and can probably see the direction (or -a- direction) this is going with regard to social networking, especially with the various bouts of anger aimed at Facebook for disrespectful treatment of users’ data and privacy settings, for the massive heap of legal trouble dear old Google got into with its massive, lawsuitastic fuckup with Buzz, and various and sundry other sites doing smaller scale things.
So it is deeply, deeply troubling to me that the current major players in creating massive social networking tools are requiring, with varying degrees of enforcement, people to display a “real” name, and in Google’s case, with Google+, forcing users to pick a gender (from offensively limited choices; no, they don’t deserve a cookie for merely providing “Other” as the only alternative to Female and Male) - which, the last I heard, would always be displayed publicly.
Have they learned nothing about gender options from what other social sites have gone through? This is not a new problem.
And also: Have they learned absolutely nothing - from, say, their own experiences with Buzz - about why making gender public is a problem due to harassment on the internets? In particular, how it can, unfortunately, be irritating to dangerous for a person to be identified as female? (Not to mention the very long history of women using pseudonyms, or first initial last name, in order to be taken seriously as authors.)
Lastly, if they are so keen on making it easy for you to limit which of your contacts sees which updates - why so strongly intent on the “real name” bullshit? If they understand that the updates you want your closest friends to see are NOT necessarily what you want your casual acquaintances to see, or your biofamily, why do they not understand that you might want to identify yourself to the two groups using completely different names? And that letting you list all the names you are known by does not solve the problem?
I’ve read a few discussions about the “real” name issue, and I’m horrified by the few comments I’ve seen to the effect that people need to “get over” privacy. (And had many, many eye rolling moments to the many, many, “I hate fake names, real names are bestest” comments. Also of note: on one such discussion I started counted the people in favor of "real" names - and stopped when I realized I had 44 who were apparently men, and only 6 who were apparently women. CLEARLY, making gender publicly known is not at all sexist, just like so many men explain elsewhere.)
All in all, I do not understand the rush to jump on the Google+ bandwagon.
I mean, I get that it’s a shiny new toy, and lots of people are looking at Facebook the way people used to look at MySpace (like it’s only what stupid children who don't "get" the internet would use *eyeroll* *scoff*), and it’s by invitation only, which increases the Oooh Want factor, and Google still manages to have some sort of shinyhappyTRUSTUS appeal, but really? Y’all trust *Google* with this information? In some cases more than Facebook? Why? Why do you think Google will successfully solve the problems that exist with Facebook?
Facebook, for all its faults, tracks the information you put on Facebook (and whatever other services you link to it). If you have a Google account, and you use it as much as you possibly can because Google Is Awesome, then Google tracks: your searches, your email, your contacts, your calendar, your documents, and everything you do on your Android phone. ETA: Plus I forgot Google maps and Google checkout. And now, if you’re using the social networking thing, they have all your interactions with your friends and family. Besides figuring out how to best advertise to you, and doing various nerdy analytics, what else are they doing with it? How long are they storing it? How secure is it from being hacked? How much of it are they sharing with the government - and, um, which governments - and under what circumstances?
Do you really have the privacy you believe you do?
If you’ve got the time, reading parts of this collection of articles about social networking might be interesting. Protecting Online Privacy is a nice piece that indicates that actually, people DO still care about privacy, despite being willing to talk openly about some things that seem like they “should” be private.
From the article: Privacy is about the fact that you have a choice in what you reveal and that you exercise the choice knowingly. . .
But the kind of control anyone can exert by tweaking privacy settings is minimal. Through a combination of weak policies, poor public discussion, and some remarkable inventions, including social networking services and mobile smartphones with cameras, we have less and less control over our reputations every day. That doesn't mean we want less control. But as long as we are held accountable for youthful indiscretions that potential employers or customs agents can easily google, our opportunities for social, intellectual, and actual mobility are limited. And we are denied second chances.
.. . controlling our use of social network sites is only the beginning. Over time, we all must develop social norms that punish bullies who expose private people to ridicule and public humiliation. Beyond that, we should work to establish strong laws that protect the vast majority of us who don't have the skill, time, attention, or awareness to constantly manage our online profiles and multiple reputations. At the very least, companies that make money from harvesting our personal preferences should have to ask us to opt in to these systems of surveillance with all the costs and benefits clearly disclosed. If allowing Facebook and Google the ability to track and store our most personal information will give us better service in return, let's make these companies convince us to enter such a deal. As of now, few of us even comprehend the extent to which we are tracked and studied for the benefit of these companies.
[emphasis mine]
I trust Google far, far less than I trust Facebook, because Google permeates the web so thoroughly, and because they have a long history of tracking and storing everything they possibly can, for reasons that are not clear. They've made some massive errors, and they are controlling things in a top-down manner that pushes my anti-authoritarian buttons in all the wrong ways (I understand that in some ways, they are legally bound to some restrictions, like restricting access to people above a certain age).
I am also uninterested in using a service that claims it wants to give people privacy, and then forces people to choose between violating the rules or risking their own safety.
Not to mention crap like telling people “Use the name you are known by, unless your last name is Cock, or if the name you are known by isn’t what we think of as a ‘real’ name.” I’m sure they’ll work out some of those individual cases, but the policy is, in general, in my not-at-all humble opinion, a heaping pile of dingos’ kidneys, and it stinks. The notion that people will only be nice to each other if they use “real” names is completely ridiculous, as is suggesting people provide evidence of official documentation of the name you submit. Or is Google our new government? (Not that Google is wholly consistent with whether pseudonyms are okay or not.)
Meanwhile, if you want more privacy - or at least some semblance of it - Minigroup claims that group interactions are always private to the group, never indexed by search engines, and various other good things (how trustworthy is this organization? How secure is it? I don’t know), SecretSocial lets you hold conversations that are never stored on disk, and are deleted when you are done with the conversation, and - still in alpha - diaspora is being built from the ground up to provide better control over your data than Facebook. ETA: If you want an alternative to Google's search, DuckDuckGo seems like a good one. They claim to neither track you nor filter results based on your search history.
As a free, open source, and distributed network, diaspora probably has the best chance of providing the kind of privacy and security that people want. There’s no one overlord forcing people to use “real” names, and gender is an optional text box. Here's a nice list of good requirements for social networking, which might be amusing to use to compare the various options.
I’ve got an account on the diaspora pod maintained here, but I don’t know of anyone else out there on any pod - if you want to try it out, drop me a note and I’ll tell you how to look me up (I'm searchable by my real name, for starters). Creating an account is super easy. (Different pods are at different levels of development, depending on what work the maintainers are doing; at this point, you can export data, but there's not yet a way to import it, so moving to different servers - pods - is not easy. The plan eventually is to make it easy for anyone to host their own pod. Again, diaspora as a whole is in alpha.) Privit.us has Facebook, Twitter, and tumblr integration; other pods may or may not.
In the meantime, if you're on Google+, here's a "useful but hard-to-find privacy feature that is disabled by default." Apparently Google's learned a few awesome tricks from Facebook about making privacy controls easy to find.
ETA one more link: If you upload photos to Google's photo service, Google can use those photos however it likes. But who cares about copyright when you get unlimited storage, amiright?
Originally posted here: http://hrafn.dreamwidth.org/512518.html. Pick your poison and comment there.