Privacy | Peter Fletcher

Bloggers’ Expectations of Privacy and Accountability: An Initial Survey

October 20, 2007 by Peter Fletcher

Here’s a few notes on an article relating to privacy concerns and practices in blogging, with references at the bottom of the post.

Ongoing authorship. People look for and expect a consistent author and voice of a blog.

Archival/permanent nature of posts are exaggerated by RSS feeds which create broadcast copies of blog posts which cannot be later deleted. Most bloggers edit past posts to some degree or another, but are also aware of the difficulty in erasing a blog post completely. This appears to be contradictory behaviour in that once a blog post is out there, it’s out there. Editing is not much use. Most bloggers are unconcerned that their blog posts are permanently archived, and show signs of being ambivalent about privacy, until such time as they have an unpleasant experience.

Frequency and brevity of blogging with corresponding reduction in quality. Often people post to blogs things which haven’t been thought through and this can be dangerous.

Most blogs are of the personal journal type. Only 3% are knowledge blogs. Existence of an audience important in helping people ‘think’ on a blog.This is a knowledge blog.

Women and teenagers account for over half the blogs and these were generally personal journals. Many blogs contain accurate personal information.

People who blog about their employers tend to anonymise their company out of fear of repercussions including the loss of jobs and other negative consequences. It is still unclear both ethically or legally where privacy boundaries sit in relation to the blogging activities of employees and this may be a useful avenue for future research. Companies are urged to have detailed and specific blogging policies in relation to what they see as being acceptable free speech and what is considered to be off-limits. Many companies are yet to fully articulate a blogging policy; despite having company blogs that are updated by employees (Microsoft). Groove Networks and Sun Microsystems are two companies with clearly defined blog policies.

People tend to construct their own policy on identification of themselves, their employer, other individuals, and other companies and products based on a variety of personal values.

“Authors in this study were willing to publish the names of friends and companies/products when they deemed the contents of an entry to be either positive or innocuous. This tendency mirrors results from a previous study showing that people are inclined to value privacy less the more socially desirable a piece of information is (Huberman, Adar, & Fine, 2004).”

Some bloggers perceive they ‘know’ their audience from reading track-backs and comments, however this only represents the ‘core’ audience of readers and not the wider audience. This lack of broader perception can lead to bloggers posting comments that their core audience want to read about; and this can lead to posts that reveal personal information that is not suited to the public arena of a blog.

Viegas, F. B. (2005). Bloggers’ expectations of privacy and accountability: An initial survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3), article 12. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html

A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States

October 20, 2007 by Peter Fletcher

I’m currently writing a piece on how micro-blogging (we can include in that mix the mini-updates of moods and feelings on MySpace and Facebook) encourages increased levels of self-disclosure and, therefore, increased risks to privacy. It appears that those at particular risks are you people who, as the quotes below suggest, treat their online profiles as intimate journals rather than as the public spaces they in fact are. Whilst clearly this suggests risks to young people, it also hints at a generational shift in attitudes with regard the ownership of information and the boundaries between what young people consider public and private.

A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States:

“Students may think that their Facebook or MySpace journal entries are private but they are actually public diaries.”

“Herein lies the privacy paradox. Adults are concerned about invasion of privacy, while teens freely give up personal information. This occurs because often teens are not aware of the public nature of the Internet.”

Micro-blogging and privacy

October 17, 2007 by Peter Fletcher

My final essays are due soon and I’m writing one of them on how micro-blogging is leading to increased levels of self disclosure and what how this may affect individual privacy. My initial thoughts are that yes, people are disclosing more about themselves and they do this to achieve various personal and economic gains. But as a counterpoint, some people may be unaware of what the collection of their micro-blogs may in fact say about them, and they may be unaware that their posts are virtually permanent, are more public than they may be intended, and may give away information that was not intended for the actual audience.

For example, someone may post that they’re “at the beach” and this may give a burglar notice that their house is unwatched. The same post may inadvertently tip off a boss that a person is having a day off when they were booked on sick leave. There are any number of unintended consequences of this micro-blogging phenomena.

So I think I’ll include in my essay individual conceptions of private and public spaces and how this is blurred on the Internet, and the the all-pervasiveness of surveillance that can be achieved through monitoring micro-blogging sites including Facebook and MySpace. Is there anything else worth including?

Matt Cutts disagrees with Privacy International

October 16, 2007 by Peter Fletcher

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team is not taking Privacy International’s accusation of poor privacy practices lying down. In a fiery and enthusiastic post on his private blog, Cutts claims that PI simply walked past companies that were handling privacy poorly, and focussed instead on a company that is doing something positive about the issue. However, Cutts tends to justify his position by pointing to companies that have done worse than Google as opposed to defending the accusations on their own merits, He cites, for example, the release by AOL of millions of raw search queries that lead to the identification of an AOL user. If this is the case, AOL indeed has some improvements to make, but their sloppiness does not make Google a model corporate citizen. And simply because Google is helping out young software programmers with real world experience, does not change the fact that Google’s software necessarily relies on significant and ongoing surveillance that must surely become more comprehensive as new and more personalised services are added.

Undoubtedly PI may have erred on the heavy-handed side when making their assessment of Google. In fact, their report stated that their findings would be seen as controversial. But Google is a big corporation and, rather then being thin-skinned and sensitive, would do well to take on board the concerns expressed in the report and work toward being extra-diligent in the handling of customers’ private information.

On Google and DoubleClick

October 14, 2007 by Peter Fletcher

Google wants to get to know you – more. Although widely critised for their privacy policies, including a stinging rebuke from Privacy International, Google is mounting a PR campaign of epic proportions to convince web surfers, legislators, and the public in general that the world will be a better place by the search giant knowing even more details about our lives.

As as has been reported here previously, Google is currently in negotiations with the FTC and EEC to seek approval for their USD$3.1 billion (yes, that is a lot of money)
purchase of online advertising agency DoubleClick. Their strategy is simple. Google already dominates the search advertising market with their USD$10.6 billion dollar revenue stream continuing to grow on the back of their highly successful Adsense advertising programme – Adsense places advertisements onto web pages based on the page’s content. But as much as that is an ingenious, and clearly lucrative marketing strategy, Google knows little about the interests of web surfers in general. And that’s where the powerplay of the DoubleClick purchase begins. Doubleclick is the master of the online advertising world; there’s hardly a major brand who hasn’t used the company to design an online campaign. And the reason for their success is that they’re clever, very clever. Utilising an intricate system of advertisements, cookies, and other tricks of the trade, DoubleClick can track the movements of web surfers as they travel from site to site. From this tracking, surveillance, and recording, DoubleClick has amassed profiles of consumers to the point where they are now able to deliver tailored web advertising to a web surfer based on their surfing habits. And it is this asset that has Google so interested. By combining there immense power in search, with DoubleClick’s strength in digital advertising, Google will have completed an amazing metamorphosis from garage-incubated hatchling, to online privacy monster in just 10 short years.

Clearly, there are significant concerns about the power Google will have at its disposal, particularly as that power translates into potential breaches of individual privacy. After all, Google/DoubleClick will have the resources, based on the combination of search and browsing history, to predict and influence consumer behaviour in ways never before imagined. And it is these threats that have privacy advocacy groups clambering to be heard, and it is these capabilities that are seeing competitors, such as Yahoo and Microsoft running to the government accusing Google of being variously anti-competitive and a risk to individual privacy.

Google know there’s a lot at stake here. Knowing that better targeted advertising means more effective advertising, and more effective advertising means bigger advertising revenues, Google continues to pursue this deal vigorously. With some pundits expecting them to gain the required approvals for the deal, we could soon find that the “Do No Evil” enterprise knows much more about us than we might expect.

PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE IN COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK

October 13, 2007 by Peter Fletcher

PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE IN COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK: “The source of our anxiety is not the principle of formal institutional surveillance and control over us — that is implicit in our acceptance of life in a modern capitalist nation. Rather, we are upset by the technological possibilities for a vastly expanded exercise of corporate and government ability to keep track of us.”

Google privacy concerns compounded by cookie vulnerability

October 12, 2007 by Peter Fletcher

Competition is a wonderful thing. It encourages innovation, keeps prices in check, and it brings to our world new and exciting products that create benefits to humanity. But competition and innovation don’t always work for everyone, and all too often the consequences of rapid product development are unnecessary risks to society. And it is this backdrop that provides an interesting, if not fascinating, twist to a new battle between Internet search giant Google and software behemoth Microsoft.

It seems hardly surprising that Microsoft has announced plans to counter the threat posed by Google documents and spreadsheets. Google’s entry into the office productivity market is clever strategy. For years now, Microsoft has been the leader in this lucrative marketplace, holding what many believe to be an unassailable monopoly. Previous attempts to establish a breach-head into the office applications market by various competitors has met with little or no success. Microsoft, for example, have no doubt kept a close watch on Open Office, a suite of office productivity applications which, despite receiving rave critical reviews and being totally free, has caused an insignificant number of customers to shift their allegiance. With this in mind, Google’s announcement of their release of Google Docs could easily have been taken lightly by Microsoft; and it appeared for some time that is exactly what happened. After all, Docs was released as a beta version in September 2006 and Microsoft’s response has been almost 12 months in the making. But Microsoft knows that Google is Google. With a big brand, lots of customers, and huge developer resources at their disposal, the search giant can make things happen. Which is precisely why Microsoft has responded to Google’s web-only offering by creating Office Live Workspace, a program that works with Microsoft Office products allowing people to view, store, and share Office documents online. To many people, this product is a welcome innovation. Mobile workers, students, and travelers will undoubtedly benefit from the increased flexibility that Internet based storage provides, without the arduous task of migrating their Office documents to Google Docs. So what then could be the downside in such rapid development of Internet based software?

The risk to consumers comes from a security threat from Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks which are instigated when a line of code, placed on a malicious but otherwise normal web page, captures a person’s cookie details and potentially gives the hacker access to user names and passwords. A recent report on Google Blogoscoped reveals how such an attack, created in a controlled environment, allowed a ‘hacker’ limited access to another person’s Google account – including Google Docs. Whilst Google are aware of the problem and continue to issue security warnings to webmasters, the fact that a person’s Google Docs area was potentially compromised gives web surfers reason to be concerned. It may also give Microsoft the opportunity to take the high ground on security, and some degree of comfort in their decision to respond slower than usual to a competitive threat.

Indeed competition is a wonderful thing – usually. But it appears that Google’s rush to innovate, to steal a march on a competitor, to bring a product to the market quickly, has shown the dark side of innovation. It’s the dark side where privacy is not paramount and where security is not treated with the highest priority. Unless Google places the privacy and well-being of their customers first, the future for the Internet will be cause for grave concerns.