Privacy and technology

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)