Privacy and technology

From the blog post:

“Recently, we published a blog post that described how to opt out of seeing ads on Facebook targeted to you based on your offline activities. This post explained where these companies get their data, what information they share with Facebook, or what this means for your privacy. So get ready for the nitty-gritty details: who has your information, how they get it, and what they do with it. It’s a lot of information, so we’ve organized it into an FAQ for convenience.”

Abstract:

“This paper discusses the general characteristics of online markets from a competition theory perspective and the implications for competition policy. Three important Internet markets are analyzed in more detail: search engines, online auction platforms, and social networks. Given the high level of market concentration and the development of competition over time, we use our theoretical insights to examine whether leading Internet platforms have non-temporary market power. Based on this analysis we answer the question whether any specific market regulation beyond general competition law rules is warranted in these three online markets.”

(Source: techliberation.com)

From the Abstract:

“Over the past decade, social network sites have experienced dramatic growth in popularity, reaching most demographics and providing new opportunities for interaction and socialization. Through this growth, users have been challenged to manage novel privacy concerns and balance nuanced trade-offs between disclosing and withholding personal information. To date, however, no study has documented how privacy and disclosure evolved on social network sites over an extended period of time. In this manuscript we use profile data from a longitudinal panel of 5,076 Facebook users to understand how their privacy and disclosure behavior changed between 2005|the early days of the network|and 2011.”

(Source: privacylives.com)

From the Abstract:

“We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests.”

(Source: eff.org)

From the Abstract:

“When you share content in an online social network, who is listening? Users have scarce information about who actually sees their content, making their audience seem invisible and difficult to estimate. However, understanding this invisible audience can impact both science and design, since perceived audiences influence content production and self-presentation online. In this paper, we combine survey and large-scale log data to examine how well users’ perceptions of their audience match their actual audience on Facebook. We find that social media users consistently underestimate their audience size for their posts, guessing that their audience is just 27% of its true size.”

(Source: nu.nl)

Uit het artikel:

“Uit een brief die de vader van […] op 14 september 2012 aan diverse buurtbewoners schreef, blijkt dat op vrijdag 7 september het meisje via Facebook een uitnodiging voor haar ‘Sweet Little 16’- partijtje naar een groepje vrienden verstuurde, maar die per ongeluk op publiek had gezet. ‘Vervolgens is een vriend van een vriend ermee vandoor gegaan en heeft 500 vrienden uitgenodigd. Nog diezelfde vrijdag hebben wij de uitnodiging van internet gehaald maar toen was het kwaad al geschied.’ […] Onder de naam ‘Project X Haren’ ging de feestuitnodiging een eigen leven leiden. Duizenden mensen werden via Facebook, Twitter en blogs geattendeerd op het feest en accepteerden de invitatie. Er werden filmpjes op YouTube gepubliceerd en ook werd er geflyerd op diverse plekken in Groningen. Op 16 september kregen de traditionele media lucht van het op handen zijnde feest. Het artikel ‘Paniek in dorp: Meisje zet verjaardagsparty op Facebook’ op Joop.nl toonde de brief van de vader. Daarin schreef papa nog: ‘voorlopig zijn we van mening dat extra publiciteit het proces eerder versterkt dan dempt’, maar dat was toen al een gepasseerd station. Openlijk was het ouderlijk huis aan de Harense […] ten prooi gevallen aan een mediahype. Vanaf 18 september volgden eerst Trouw, toen Spits en daarna iedereen. Met als absoluut dieptepunt de oproep van Radio 3FM op vrijdag 21 september om met zijn allen massaal naar Haren af te reizen.”

From the Abstract:

“Most teenage patients do not disclose their personal health information on social media, even though the study found a pervasive use of Facebook. Facebook is a place to be a “regular”, rather than a sick teenager. It is a place where teenage patients stay up-to-date about their social life - it is not seen as a place to discuss their diagnosis and treatment.”

(Source: phiprivacy.net)

From the introduction to the document:

“The practice of employers looking for background information about job candidates on social networking websites such as Facebook has grown dramatically.3 These sites, along with search engines, are now being used as a business tool by human resources departments to perform background checks on potential employees. Users of Facebook and other such sites should post information with their eyes wide open - considering the risks to their employment prospects, current and future. This paper provides important information and suggests ways of mitigating and minimizing such risks.”

(Source: privacylives.com)

From paragraphs 12-14:

“Although the precise language has changed over time, Facebook’s Central Privacy Page and Profile Privacy Page have, in many instances, stated that the Profile Privacy Settings allow users to ‘control who can see’ their profile information, by specifying who can access it, e.g., ‘Only Friends’ or ‘Friends of Friends.’ […] Similarly, although the precise interface has changed over time, Facebook’s Profile Privacy Settings have continued to specify that users can restrict access to their profile information to the audience the user selects, e.g., ‘Only Friends,’ ‘Friends of Friends.’ […] None of the pages described in Paragraphs 10-13 have disclosed that a user’s choice to restrict profile information to ‘Only Friends’ or ‘Friends of Friends’ would be ineffective as to certain third parties. Despite this fact, in many instances, Facebook has made profile information that a user chose to restrict to ‘Only Friends’ or ‘Friends of Friends’ accessible to any Platform Applications that the user’s Friends have used (hereinafter ‘Friends’ Apps’). Information shared with such Friends’ Apps has included, among other things, a user’s birthday, hometown, activities, interests, status updates, marital status, education (e.g., schools attended), place of employment, photos, and videos.”

(Source: Guardian)

Uit ‘Waarom dit boekje?’:

“Deze maand kreeg Facebook een Big Brother Award toegekend als organisatie namens Bits of Freedom voor het schenden van de privacy van haar gebruikers. Wij zijn en velen met ons, van mening dat dit onterecht is. […] Onze boodschap is dat de gebruiker zelf de grootste schender van haar privacy is. De blog leidde tot veel bijval, maar het meest gehoorde commentaar is dat het voor niet iedereen duidelijk is hoe je dit moet instellen. Gelijktijdig, onafhankelijk van elkaar, hadden we de handdoek opgepakt en waren begonnen met een artikel over hoe je je privacy moet instellen op Facebook. Om allebei geen dubbel werk te doen hebben we de handen ineen geslagen. Daarom dit kleine boekje waarmee iedereen zelf zijn privacy beter kan beschermen.”

(Source: privacynieuws.nl)

From ‘What we found’:

“After reading the policies and answering comprehension questions, 36% of Facebook users and 37% of Google users surveyed will change their behavior. Of the options presented in the survey, most Facebook users plan to change their privacy settings and be more careful posting information in the future. Google users indicated they’d take a number of actions, including changing privacy settings and clearing search history. Fifty percent will use Google less, while only 35% will use Facebook less. Google users may be more apt to reduce their use, since there are viable alternatives to many Google services (e.g., Bing, Worio and MapQuest). Facebook users don’t have the same luxury. Today, no alternative social network of similar scale exists.”

(Source: automatiseringgids.nl)

From the abstract:

“In this paper, we provide survey data that show that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site’s restrictions and that they are often complicit in helping their children join the site. Our data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data.”

From the abstract:

“In this paper, we evaluate how vulnerable [Online Social Networks (OSNs)] are to a large-scale infiltration by socialbots: computer programs that control OSN accounts and mimic real users. We adopt a traditional web-based botnet design and built a Socialbot Network (SbN): a group of adaptive socialbots that are orchestrated in a command-and-control fashion. We operated such an SbN on Facebook|a 750 million user OSN|for about 8 weeks. We collected data related to users’ behavior in response to a large-scale in ltration where socialbots were used to connect to a large number of Facebook users.”

(Source: nakedsecurity.sophos.com)

From Objectives of “europe-v-facebook”:

“It is almost impossible for the user to really know what happens to his or her personal data when using facebook. For example “removed” content is not really deleted by facebook and it is often unclear what facebook exactly does with our data. Users have to deal with vague and contradictory privacy policies and cannot fully estimate the consequences of using facebook. A company that constantly asks its costumers to be as transparent as possible should be equally transparent when it comes to the use of its costumers personal data. Transparency is not only a question of fairness but it is also a principle of European data protection law. It is time that the biggest social network worldwide sticks to these legal principles.”

(Source: solv.nl)