Study: Privacy Not Dead to the Younger Generation

From Yahoo News: A new study coming out of Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania suggests young people do not care significantly less about privacy than the older generation. Amongst the findings:

• Eighty-eight percent of people of all ages said they have refused to give out information to a business because they thought it was too personal or unnecessary. Among young adults, 82 percent have refused, compared with 85 percent of those over 65.

• Most people — 86 percent — believe that anyone who posts a photo or video of them on the Internet should get their permission first, even if that photo was taken in public. Among young adults 18 to 24, 84 percent agreed — not far from the 90 percent among those 45 to 54.

• Forty percent of adults ages 18 to 24 believe executives should face jail time if their company uses someone's personal information illegally — the same as the response among those 35 to 44 years old.

The sample is big: about 1,000 people, though smaller than the 27,000 the Eurobarometer surveys use (which also record some interesting results on attitudes to privacy). It's interesting to see empirical research on an issue people are all too often happy to accept quite crude generalisations as obvious truths.

I'd also be interested to see work on whether there has been a change in people's attitudes over the last 5-10 years. I have a hunch many young people who didn't care about privacy when they first started using the Internet and social networking sites have become far more conscious of privacy issues as they have become more prominent topics of controversy online and in the wider media.

Data Mining on Facebook?

The Guardian has run a story on Facebook against the backdrop of the Ceop “panic button” proposal which reveals that the social networking site conducts algorithm-driven monitoring that “track[s] the behaviour of its users and flag[s] up suspicious activity.” OK, that sounds like data mining, but why is this story of relevance to counter-terrorism? Interestingly, the article states that "Facebook's international law enforcement is lead by Max Kelly, a former FBI agent who worked on cyber-crime and counter-terrorism before moving to Facebook five years ago." The article also discusses how Facebook interacts with law enforcement in the US and UK. It suggests that UK officials still feel Facebook doesn’t do enough to assist them and the UK public to protect the safety of children.

Comment: Privacy is Dead According to Facebook Chief

There's a nice discussion piece about social networking and privacy in the Times, following on from Mark Zuckerberg's reported statement that 'privacy is dead' (a statement, according to the article, he is now trying to downplay). As well as pointing out how careful Zuckerberg is about safeguarding his own privacy, it goes through the arguments that privacy has become less important to the younger generation who make an informed choice that the benefits of sharing information outweigh the disadvantages. A couple of choice quotations:

As Daniel Masoliver, a 24-year-old postgraduate student in London, put it: “The only reason privacy ever existed is because Facebook didn’t. People have always liked talking about what they’re into and the more people share information with one another, the more comfortable others are joining in.”

And another (somewhat tongue in cheek one imagines) from Ross Anderson, a Professer of Security Engineering at Cambridge:

“At Cambridge all the party invitations go out on Facebook,” he said. “So if you don’t have Facebook, you won’t get invited to any parties, so you won’t have any sex, so you won’t have any children, so your genes die out. So it’s an evolutionary necessity to be on Facebook.”

Ross Anderson also touches on what I consider the key point when it comes to the argument that privacy is no longer important because as a society we have weighed up the pros and cons and decided it is not needed:

By analysing...[social networking] data, “spider” programs can draw up social graphs that reveal your sexuality, political beliefs and other characteristics. According to Ross Anderson...it can be done even if you list as few as eight friends.

That might not matter so much in Britain, says Anderson, “but in a country like Iran, where they punish gays, this is serious stuff”.

Iran may seem an extreme case, but I think there is a huge degree to which the acceptability of behaviour revealed by internet activity depends on what social circles you live in. It's a very different matter sharing facets of your life such as sexual preference when you live in San Francisco, than it is doing so in an isolated, conservative town. But decisions about what level of privacy is available for users tends to be made by people who live in more liberal communities, tolerant of far more than is typically the case in wider society.

News: Programme Can Reveal the Sexual Orientation of Social Network Users

From Privacy.org: 2 students at MIT have developed a program, nicknamed project Gaydar, which will predict sexual orientation on the basis of who the individual 'friends' on social networking sites:

“Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization in San Francisco. “Certainly if most or many of your friends are of a particular religious or political or sexual category, others may conclude you are part of the same category - even if you haven’t said so yourself.”

News: Facebook Adopts Improved Privacy Controls

From Jurist: Following discussions with the Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Facebook have announced that they would give users more control over the information they share through their profiles.

Big Brother is Watching your Status Updates

From Slashdot: apparantly police saw a facebook message inviting 15 guests to an 'all night party', and in response preemptively shut it down as a potential 'illegal rave' using four police cars, a riot van and a police helicopter in the process. Reports on Slashdot and The Register.

Should the police be monitoring what people say on social networking sites? As I've noted before, there is a large measure of ambiguity over whether the exchanges that happen on such sites count as public or private. Should there be any restriction of this monitoring? Legally, should it be treated like an overheard conversation in the street, or like private correspondence by mail?

At the end of the day, most accept the legitimacy of police surveillance under some conditions at least, but when should they act on the basis of evidence gathered in this way? Should it only be used to prevent certain sorts of crimes? Or is anything illegal fair game?

Pictures That Just Won't Go Away...

From the BBC News site: photos which have been 'deleted' from social networking sites are often still available for long afterwards. In practice 'deletion' actually only results in the link to the photo being removed, rather than taking down the page where the photo is posted - if you type in the URL, you can still see the photo.

Presumably it's true that anyone who had a copy of the URL would have had an opportunity to take a copy of the photo anyway? Still, the fact that it is still out there and 'available' might be regarded as intrusive in any case. Do these companies have an obligation to preserve their user's privacy when it comes to these issues?

Facebook: Private?

From Slashdot: Following on from the reports of people possibly having their social networking activities monitored by their work, it seems that at least one company has taken the step of prohibiting using social networking sites as part of the recruitment and hiring process.

Permanent Record?

The government will request Internet Service Providers and mobile phone companies to hold all communications data - websites visited, emails sent etc. - so that they can be accessed by the security services. There are strikingly similar editorial pieces in the Independent and the Telegraph, and a stronger denunciation from Henry Porter in the Guardian.

I'm curious to know how long companies will be required to hold this data, and also whether there are any specific requirements regarding the the companies' security - part of concern about the creation of a central database holding all this sensitive information (a plan which the government has dropped) is the vulnerability to such a database to unauthorised snoopers hacking their way in.

Facebook: Public Space or Private Space?

A woman has been fired for using facebook while taking the day off work. The intriguing bit is that she claims her employers created a false profile to 'friend' her and spy on her. Whether or not that is actually what happened (the company deny that it is), I wouldn't be surprised if it were common - many employers will just find it irresistable to keep tabs on their employees.

I'm mainly interested in how this compares to real world interactions of a similar kind. If she had taken the day off work and was spotted talking to a friend in a cafe, presumably this would not count as an invasion of privacy, whereas if someone from work had spied on her through her bedroom window this would be completely unacceptable. So where does facebook fit in here? Is facebook interaction public or private?

MEP's Recommendations

Mathias Vermeulen, also working on the Detecter project, has interesting news over at his blog the Lift. The Members of the European Parliament have made a series of recommendations for protecting privacy, security and freedom from censorship on the internet.

Government to Monitor Facebook

The BBC is reporting that the government proposes to keep a record of interactions on social networking sites like facebook. They claim they will not be looking at message content, just who is talking to who.

Apparantly this will help to tackle crime gangs and terrorists. Some friends of mine have expressed amazement at the idea that any terrorist or gangster worth his salt would ever post anything remotely compromising on something like facebook.

As it happens I recall reading an odd case in Private Eye a month or two back where some racist bigots got someone Asian sacked at work and then were stupid enough to boast about it in an easily accessible group on Facebook. So I think monitoring facebook in this way will help to catch some criminals.

But I think the sorts of cases it will help in aren't those involving organised criminal gangs or terrorists. Anyone involved at that level will know that their internet activity can easily be monitored. If you think that there is a loss of privacy in police having access to who you are interacting with (which I do) I'm doubtful that you can point to 'the war on terror' as a justification. Does the potential for dealing with less serious criminality justify police monitoring these sites?