If you’re thinking of using the new Facebook groups don’t. Well not just yet. At the least hold off for a while and let Facebook iron out the kinks.

First some background.

Facebook recently announced the release of a new version of Facebook Groups. Rather than improving on the old they simply started a new version that works quite differently to the old. They did the same thing with Facebook Places pages. They’re like Facebook Pages only different. Don’t get me started.

Back to Groups.

Here’s what Facebook said about Groups.

With new Groups, we made it easy for you to build a space for important groups of people in your life—your family, your soccer team, your book club. All you have to do to get started is to create a group, add friends and start sharing.

If that’s all that happened things would be rosy. It’s not.

Unlike a Facebook Page a Group is opt-out by default. That means I can add you to one of my groups without your permission. It’s like tagging one of your friends on a photo. If the person doesn’t want to be associated with either the photo or tag they can always untag themselves or leave the group.

So far, sort of so good. But it’s what happens once the interactions start that’s the real problem.

In their infinite wisdom Facebook have set email notifications on by default. That means that every – let me repeat, every – interaction within the group is accompanied by an email. Every time someone joins, posts, comments or shares creates an email. For the inexperienced it’s an email storm the likes of which has never before been seen.

Of course there’s a solution. In the upper left hand corner of the group page there’s an Edit Settings button (Who would think to click that?!). It provides an opt-out for the emails and a few options for group notifications.

Once group members understand they can control the email notifications things start to settle down. But it can still get bloody hectic.

On one group I belong to the conversation moves so fast the screen literally comes alive with new posts, comments and Likes. And that’s a group of about 30. Imagine what would happen in a much larger group.

There are three default privacy settings: Open, Closed and Secret. Here’s what the Facebook blog has to say:

By default, new Groups are Closed.  That means anything posted in the group is only visible to people in it. The name of the group and its members are still visible to everyone, so your friends can find the right group. You can also use the settings to create groups that have their name and members unlisted (“Secret”), or create groups that have more public settings (“Open”).

Just what “more public settings” means exactly they don’t make clear. I assume it’s open to the world.

Groups have another slightly kooky feature. People who are members can invite their friends to join. Conceivably you could end up having your worst enemy as one of your group members. Well, not really.

Facebook provide Group admins with the ability to delete members. If you don’t want someone in your group you can always off them with a couple of clicks. Of course that’s not always the best thing to do politically.

People who aren’t a group member can request permission to join. This sends the Group admin a notification and it’s either a Yes or No. Or the request can sit in the in-tray not actioned.

The Group chat facility is pretty cool. Group chat’s been around for ages but getting a bunch of like-minded people together in the one chat room can be lots of fun. I’m thinking of using it as a Q&A forum.

As much as some get upset at being added to a group without their permission I can see a few people being miffed about not being invited to join a group. “What, I’ve been left out? When were you going to tell me about this?!”

If you are going to give groups a try here are a few tips that will make the experience less harrowing.

• Set up the ground rules early. Add them to the Group description.
• Start with a small group. Less than 10 will give you hours of fun!
• If you’re going to add someone to the group send them a DM first. Let them know how they can opt-out of the the email notifications. Trust me, they’ll thank you for it.
• Consider setting your privacy settings to Secret. Within minutes of starting my first Group I had a bunch of new people requesting to join. It can get messy fast. You can always change it later.
• Learn off someone else. If you want to get a feel for how it works head to my Real Estate Industry Group and have a go.

Now I’ll leave it to you to come up with some other tips. What’s been your Facebook Group experience? Have you seen any creative ways to use them?

As I write, Jay – Z is a trending topic on Twitter. Every few seconds a flurry of tweets arrive containing links and comments about the release of his new music video, Run This Town. A similar thing is happening on Facebook.

On Facebook the search term “Jay – Z” results in a long list of status updates sharing the artist’s YouTube video with their friends. It’s a fascinating realtime snapshot of what’s catching mainstream attention on the net.

There are a number of filters in the new search area. The two of most interest are Posts by Friends and Posts by Everyone. At the moment extended trading hours is the hot political issue here in Western Australia. By clicking on the Posts by Friends filter I’m quickly able to gauge the reaction of my friends to the governments decision not to extend trading hours. They’re not happy.

The Posts by Everyone filter displays status updates  from users who have their status updates privacy setting as Everyone. There are a number of sub-filters that can be applied to a search that produce results that are more relevant.

Many Facebook users are unaware that their status updates are searchable. After all the privacy settings on Facebook are complex and, at times, difficult to understand. It’s therefore important that individuals take responsibility for creating privacy settings that reflect what they want the public to know.

Photo credit:

I sense my thesis will address the issue of what constitutes the private and public. Social networking and social networks can be particularly problematic when it comes to defining what is a private or public space.

As Patricia Lange points out, a number of scholars draw the private and public divide without defining what is meant by these terms. Warren and Brandeis’ (actually it was the judge, but we’ll let that slide) said that privacy was the “right to be let alone”. Perhaps this was an easy way to define privacy back then, but defining the notion of a private space is a complex undertaking.

Lange argues that spaces are fractal in that there component parts take on the nature of the context in which they are situated. She provides the example of a home which, to the community is a private space, but within the home there are both private and public spaces. Lange refers to Gal (2002) who proposes that spaces can be defined as both private and public dependant on the perspective of the observer at the time of the observation. In other words, what is a private space at one point of a day may become public at another – a public toilet is no longer a public space when in use.

Lange suggests YouTube videos are posted in a similarly fractalised manner as publicly private (where people post videos that are potentially available to a very wide audience but use the software and coded tags as a way to make the videos fact difficult to find and view except for close friends) and privately public (where people post public videos but actively hide or disguise their identities in the movies and/or their profiles). One such example provided by Lange is that of MadV who actively takes steps to disguise his identity both in the video and an his profile but presents videos that have broad appeal to a wide audience.

In the context of research into the issue of sovereignty between organisations and employees, much of the parry and thrust of the debate must occur in the realm of what constitutes a public space. Does a blog intended for the writer’s family and friends become a public space because it can be found – albeit with some effort – by members of a wider audience? And what rights do companies have to dictate what is said inside walled gardens, such as Facebook? If a person takes active steps to disguise the identity of the subjects of the blog or the writer?

Gal, S. (2002). A semiotics of the public/private distinction. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13 (1), 77-95.

Drawing on work from Altman, Tufekci believes that the manner in which teenagers approach online interactions can best be understood as a process of optimisation. By this it is meant that individuals in fact want to be seen and use information about themselves as a way to be noticed but also being mindful of the pitfalls of extending too much information. He notes that doing so in an online environment poses significant increased threats thanks to the collapsing of many temporal boundaries that exist in the real world.

He makes the point that an online environment captures data by default. This is done via cookies, ISP’s, databases, RSS feeds, etc, etc. and makes for a prime environment for surveillance. On the other hand, the real world requires a conscious decision PRIOR to a conversation to record the conversation eg a wire tap, or some other form of surveillance. Unlike a real world conversation that, unless recorded, disappears immediately as it occurs, a digital conversation is recorded and can be retrieved months and years later. This is a significant difference in that the default positions are at polar ends of the surveillance spectrum.

Tufekci claims the Internet can be divided into the instrumental Internet and the expressive Internet. By this he means that the former is where we go online to achieve an outcome and uses the purchase of airline tickets as an example. The latter, he contends, refers to the creation of self trough identity expression and impression management through the release of personal information.

He suggests that Altman’s model of privacy, where boundaries are actively negotiated, is a more accurate reflection of what occurs in an online environment then early conceptions of privacy as “the right to be let alone”. He suggests that people don’t necessarily seek more seclusion, but rather, at times, seek more self-disclosure as a way of self-creation.

For me, this rings true. As an active participant on FB, I’m aware that the most interesting profiles and relationships are with those participants who “open up” or show some form of vulnerability or express an outrageous opinion. Others who treat FB as a personal brochure have little interaction and therefore an unexciting presence. Interesting people are usually interesting both on and offline.

He draws on the findings of Pallin and Dourish who suggest that an online environment creates special problems for privacy. We have no idea of who is watching and where and therefore have no control over our spatial boundaries and, because conversations are recorded, virtually forever, we have no control over our temporal boundaries. Our audience can exist far into the the future. Finally there is the problem of the management of context. What is posted on MySpace may well not be appropriate in a job interview, however, because of the nature of the digital environment, these two contexts can (and often do) intersect with often unintended consequences.

Tufecki’s research indicated that a staggering 94.9% of Facebook users used their real names on their profiles. There was some tendency of Facebook users to make their profiles visible only to friends, but the research found there was no correlation between an open profile and the use of a real name. They found there was a general link between concerns about online privacy and making telephone numbers available. Males were more likely to display their phone numbers.

The study showed that participants modified their profiles, particularly the display of telephone numbers in line with their own privacy concerns, but they were generally unconcerned about a future employer reading their profile. Participants showed little concern about the consequences of a potential future partner seeing their profile. On the contrary they saw it as a potential benefit for a potential partner to see their profile.

He concludes by suggesting that disclosure is sought by youth as a way to create the self and as a way to limit access to the self through proactive self-disclosure. Although most concern, he claims is for present issues, youth could be more concerned about future problems that could result from the persistence of data.

Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure
Regulation in Online Social Network Sites (subscription required)
Zeynep Tufekci
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

DOI: 10.1177/0270467607311484
2008; 28; 20
Bulletin of Science Technology Society
http://bst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/1/20

Here’s a few comments on an article from Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore Vol 14(1): 13–20

Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck
Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence
danah boyd
Harvard University and University of California-Berkeley, USA

Boyd argues that changes made to the public feed feature on Facebook have significanly altered the dynamic of what is viewed as private. She uses the example of a party conversation where one needs to shout to be heard only to find that everything suddenly goes quiet as you’re about to finish your sentence. What was a conversation protected in some way by the din of the surroundings, the need to be physically proximate, and the assessment that only those nearby could hear what was being said suddenly becomes a very public communication.

Boyd notes that a similar event happened when Facebook created the public feed and caused what seemingly were private moments and events – despite them being available if someone searched hard enough – into easily accessible public information. It is this disruption she suggests that is new in the digital world.

In the physical world we have become accustomed to ways to protect our privacy, notably walls, physical distance, volume of speech. However, Boyd points out that in a digital world these disappear and are replaced by search capabilities that make previously “private” information very public.

Privacy is all about control one has about information about the self, Boyd suggests. Information is private therefore, not because it is not known, but because it is carefully controlled. It is far more difficult to keep a secret then to not allow the information out at all. Some information, she opines, is only relevant in certain social settings, but Facebook’s public feed obliterated the context of this “grey”area information and disrupted the way in which people approached their privacy online.

This collapsing of social domains has resulted in what Boyd calls “social convergence” where previously discrete social contexts are brought together through technologies and digitisation. This convergence raises a number of questions, says Boyd, and significant concerns about the future of privacy as people deal with these converged domains without any form of social scripts.

Privacy International lodged a complaint with a number of privacy regulators around the world about targeted advertising in Gmail.

Official Google Blog: Google search privacy: Plain and simple

Search queries saved in logs: Misspelled search terms, prompts for “did you mean”.

IP address: Search results returned to the correct computer. Can tell which provider and general location.

Cookies: Small file stored on computer. Reminds of preferences from last time. Search results per pages and language preference

Log of visit: Receipt of visit. Search term, IP address, cookie ID, browser version, operating system, date and time of search.

Some parts of IP address and cookie will be deleted after 18 months.

A quick post to a piece on the Google Public Policy blog from Peter Fleischer about Google and the EU policy on data retention. Will probably be worth coming back to this one.

Google Public Policy Blog: Data retention: the right balance between privacy and security:

“Citizens should have a right to privacy online. And governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe. Finding the right balance between privacy and security is a delicate balancing act. Europe’s recent experience with data retention holds interesting lessons for everyone concerned with this balance.”

Are individual privacy rights at greater risk as a result of Google’s privacy practices?

I found this on Peter Fleischer’s blog. It’s Eric Scmidt, CEO of Google, urging the nations of the world to adopt new privacy regulations. Although it sounds good in theory, the cynic in me believes that it’s a diversionary tactic to take attention away from the Google/DoubleClick deal. The comment by Anne Cavoukian tends to reinforce this thought. Ms Cavoukian suggests Google adopts a set of privacy standards her organisation has already developed.