Posts tagged facebook

Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy

I’ve kept meaning to link to the EFF’s collection of excerpts from facebook’s privacy policies. They tell a pretty clear story.

I recently deleted my facebook account (having suspended it a few months back) partly because keeping up with its changing approach to privacy, terms+conditions, etc. is simply too much work. Representing social relationships and working out privacy/publicy in that context is always going to be hard, but facebook’s approach appears more and more cavalier, reliant on their users’ confusion and/or apathy.

Friday (ish) links – January 15th 2010

A few random selections from this week’s reading.

Discussions of online privacy continue to rumble on. ReadWriteWeb had a piece about (facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg repeating the adage that “the age of privacy is over.” Zuckerberg’s comments would appear to continue the confusion around facebook and privacy. Facebook’s popularity is at least in part due to peoples’ perceptions that there is some privacy (or at least control) inherent in it, but they keep eroding that. I deleted my facebook account a few weeks ago, partly because I was tired of negotiating its plethora of options. Twitter’s “always public” or “private” are really so much easier to handle.

Jeremy Gould pointed out O2′s SIM only iPhone plan on twitter the other day. I really wish I could find an equivalent in the US. On our last trip I was carrying two iPhones and a Palm Pre, but ended up buying a $10 virgin mobile phone from Best Buy.

Perhaps the biggest news in web development this week was the release of jQuery 1.4. The full announcement is here. I’m particularly pleased about all events now supporting live(), the improved support for contexts for actions, and the performance speedups, but many of the API changes look very nice. It’s been great to see several meaty blog posts about how some of the new features/improvements were achieved, such as this one on how the live() support works and Ben Nadel’s piece on handling problems with mouseover/mouseout.

In a similar vein I continue to enjoy Yehuda Katz’ coverage of Rails 3, including this piece on ActiveModel. It’s great to finally have a simple way to use AR’s validations, callbacks, etc. outside of ActiveRecord without resorting to nasty tricks. Gabe de Silveira also deserves some credit, not only for his very useful looking validation_scopes gem, but also for a dissection of its writing.

I missed this month’s LRUG but have been reading up on Dragonfly, a ruby library to handle image uploads and produce resized versions on the fly based on directives in a view. Putting that logic in the view makes a lot of sense and I really like the rails integration being handled by inserting rack middleware. I’ll definitely be looking for a project to try it out on.

Ajaxian continues to be the best source for impressive efforts with javascript. This week I was especially taken by efforts to implement audio sampling in firefox.

Fresh from Silicon Roundabout’s appearance in the latest issue of Wired UK, Ben Terrett of RIG has been working on some merchandise. I guess this joke’s just going to keep going.

TinyMCE is now on github. Chances are it’ll remain a pain to use (as are all editors of its ilk) but at least it can be checked out more quickly now.

And of course it’s been impossible to miss the tragedy in Haiti. The past few years have seen really impressive efforts to harness open source tools and techniques for use in disasters. Andrew Turner’s blog is a good stopping off point to find out what the mapping community has been up to.

Selected (belated, extended) Saturday Links

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.

Selected Saturday Links

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days.

Don’t imply privacy

Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately.

We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites that might be described as “social networks” or simply a blog that provides a way to connect up a commenters contributions. On any new project questions inevitably come up about whether or not users should be able to hide their profiles or specific pieces of information, often influenced by the way facebook’s closed walls give a sense of privacy by not letting google index profile data. I’m given to thinking that facebook’s approach has actually hurt such discussions, by implying a level of privacy they don’t really offer.

The problem is that approaches like facebook’s are far more about an illusion of privacy than any actual protection. The artifacts of our online presence, our comments, our photos, etc. and perhaps more importantly our friends’ comments and photos, are never going to be entirely shielded just because we can hide our profiles, but hiding profiles can make us think that protection is there. Similarly attempts by some sites to hide profiles from users who aren’t logged in offers an illusion. Because there’s a hurdle to see your profile it’s tempting to think that it’s protected, but that’s simply not the case.

Our designs need to guide people to be careful about what they’re putting in their profiles rather than having those profiles hidden, and to remember that their online artifacts will last even if the attention given to them dips from its initial high. Unless we’re providing something much more secure than a “hidden” profile, we should avoid the implication that our tools (rather than their behaviour) are what will offer privacy.

[Obviously there are some cases where our architecture needs to work harder to offer privacy, but that's far from the general case]