Entries Tagged 'Research' ↓

In today’s Quick Hits, we discuss how people-search databases make it hard for victims of violence to stay hidden. We also talk about Facebook’s new steps to protect user privacy when installing third-party applications.

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Data Privacy Critical for Victims of Domestic Violence

This article from the San Francisco chronicle discusses the people-search industry and the issue of data privacy. Specifically, the article focuses on how victims of domestic violence and other crime cannot protect their addresses from their abusers, even if they’re enrolled in government programs designed to keep their identity safe.

Facebook Gives Users More Protection From Third-Party Apps

Facebook has made it easier for users to protect their privacy from third-party applications. According to Information Week, “Facebook Wednesday launched a new system that forces developers to request and receive permission when users connect to third-party applications, websites, and services” A blog post from Facebook explains the new feature in greater detail.

UK Mom Angry over Naked Images of Her Three-Year-Old on Street View

A mother in the UK is upset with Google after Street View cars photographed her three-year-old son running around naked. The image, which showed the boy’s bare backside, has since been blurred out, though it hasn’t been removed completely. The mother believes that it should be Google’s responsibility to monitor images before they go online, not hers to seek it out and file a report to remove it.

American Companies Change Strategies Based on European Privacy Laws

European views on privacy are much different than American views, which has led many Internet companies to run into problems when they set up shop overseas. As a result of European data privacy rules, however, American companies have begun to change their policies to be more user-focused, which is a good thing for everyone.

Pew Research Reveals Interesting Facts About Social Media Use

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently presented a new report on Internet usage across multiple age groups. One of the most interesting findings in the research was the revelation that between 2006 and 2009 the percentage of adults aged 18-29 who have asked someone to remove content about them from the Internet has increased from 9 percent to 18 percent.

In today’s Quick Hits we talk about Google’s secret social network, why Facebook has helped divorce attorneys, and how many social networking websites are giving up info about users’ locations.

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Google Me: Google’s Facebook Competitor Confirmed

A former Facebook CTO recently confirmed that rival company Google is developing a major social networking website based off of the Facebook user experience. Called Google Me, the project would be Google’s third attempt at a social networking site, behind Buzz, Wave, and Orkut. For what it’s worth, here’s Michael Arrington’s opinion on Google Me and why he believes Google should create a straight-up clone of Facebook.

Facebook is a Powerful Tool for Divorce Lawyers

Divorce lawyers love social media. According to an AP report, “The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence plucked from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years.” A whopping 66% of the lawyers singled out Facebook as the main source for uncovering important information, from a spouse’s infidelities to visual proof of a parent’s alcohol or drug abuse.

Denver divorce attorney Leslie Matthews says it best when she explains, “You’re finding information that you just never get in the normal discovery process — ever. People are just blabbing things all over Facebook. People don’t yet quite connect what they’re saying in their divorce cases is completely different from what they’re saying on Facebook. It doesn’t even occur to them that they’d be found out.”

The Business Podcast Talks About the Internet

In this week’s edition of The Business podcast, co-produced by UK newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, journalist Aditya Chakrabortty, author Clay Shirky, Guardian columnist Julian Glover, blogger Evgeny Morozov, Guardian business editor Dan Roberts, and author David Kirkpatrick discuss how the Internet has changed consumer behavior and transformed business.

Why I Left Facebook and Why I Came Back

In a column for the Kansas City Star, Aisha Sultan explains why she had to deactivate Facebook (and why she had to come back five days later). The column touches on the many reasons why Facebook has become such a popular destination, namely the way that it reinforces loose relationships and serves as a central hub for sharing information online. The column also features insight from attorney Craig Moore on some of the legal issues that Facebook users have faced as a result of their social networking addiction.

Social Networking Websites Leak User Location Info

Whether you know it or not, your social networking websites might be giving up your location. According to a ComputerWorld article, “A study out this week from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts shows that mobile social networks are giving data about users’ physical locations to tracking sites and other social networking services. Researchers reported that all 20 sites that were studied leaked some kind of private information to third-party tracking sites.” Some of the sites in the study included Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter.

In today’s Quick Hits, we learn how cyberbullying is like Swine Flu, why Mark Zuckerberg thinks Facebook can crack one billion users, and the role that social media has played in increasing identity theft.

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Study Shows Consumers More Trustworthy of Social Media Savvy Companies

According to the second annual Digital Influence Index, “75 percent of people surveyed said they view companies that microblog — sending short, frequent messages on sites like Twitter or status updates on social networks like Facebook — as more deserving of their trust than those that do not.” This is a compelling statistic that clearly demonstrates how important it is for businesses of all sizes to embrace the social web and proactively build strong online reputations.

Zuckerberg Predicts One Billion Users

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberg is confident that his company has only begun to grow. Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Zuckerberg said “it is almost a guarantee” that Facebook will reach one billion users just as soon as the company begins catching on in Russia, China, Japan, and Korea: the four foreign countries where the site is currently not the most popular social network.

Zuckerberg also touched on privacy concerns saying “There is a real natural tension between people seeing the value of sharing more stuff but wanting control over what they share.” As the site continues to expand internationally, let’s hope he keeps that in mind.

VidMe Promises Private Video Sharing

For all those people that want to share party videos online, but don’t want to subject themselves to the public scrutiny of Facebook, there is a new site called VidMe.com. According to the New York Times Bits Blog, “[VidMe] lets people share videos privately with only a chosen group of friends; the videos cannot be forwarded or downloaded.” VidMe is an interesting example of how the desire for privacy continues to shift the way that Internet companies operate. I will be interested to see whether VidMe users can really keep their videos private or if there is some workaround that hasn’t been discovered yet.

Identity Theft on the Rise and Hackers Aren’t to Blame

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Ben Worthen explains how hackers aren’t the only threat to user privacy online and why personal data exposed by companies or unintentionally shared on social networking websites has led to a rise in the number of identity theft victims in the United States.

Cyberbullying as a Technological “Swine Flu”

BehaviorHealthCentral.com has an interesting two-part feature on cyberbullying. The articles calls cyberbullying a “technological virus” comparing it to last year’s H1N1 outbreak. Part one of the article explores the cause of the “virus” while part two explores the “vaccines” that can be used to treat it, namely parental and school involvement.

In today’s Quick Hits, we touch on new research related to child safety online. We also explore the issue of “sexting” and whether one organization’s proposals will be successful in curbing it among students.

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Facebook’s Location-Based Features Coming Soon

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed to London press that Facebook is coming out with location-based features in the near future. Rumors of Facebook’s location-based features have been swirling since March, but the project was sidelined to deal with changes to Facebook’s privacy settings (and the subsequent problems that those changes caused). There is still no word on exactly how location-based Facebook features would work, but it’s likely that Facebook will mirror the “check-in” functionality of smaller location-based networking websites like Gowalla and Foursquare.

McAfee Survey Shows Teens Exhibit Risky Behavior Online

A recent McAfee survey, The Secret Online Lives of Teens, reveals that while teens are expert web surfers, they still routinely engage in dangerous and potentially reputation-damaging behavior online. One statistic from the study reveals that “69 percent of teens freely divulged their physical location.” The survey also touched on cyberbullying, showing that “one in three teens knew someone who has had hurtful information posted about them online.”

Report: 6 in 10 Kids Have Had “Negative Online Experiences”

In addition to the McAfee survey, the recently released Norton Online Family Report also revealed a number of eye-opening statistics about kids and teens online. The report shows that “more than six in 10 kids have had what they consider negative online experiences.” The “negative online experiences” in question include receiving a friend request from a stranger on a social networking site, downloading a virus to the family computer, and seeing violent or pornographic images online.

There was an upside to the research, however. According to the report, “87% of kids said they would seek adult support if threatened with physical harm, 84% would tell an adult if they were being blackmailed or threatened online and 71% would report something suspicious or inappropriate.”

NYC Department of Education Proposes Ban on Sexting

Sexting, using digital technology to send and share explicit sexual photographs, is a major problem among teens. It is also a problem for schools who don’t know how to monitor it and prosecutors whose only legal remedy is to arrests kids for child pornography. Could a blanket ban on sexting help keep students safe?

According to the Huffington Post, that’s what the New York City Department of Education is proposing with the added caveat that students could be punished for sexting done outside of school hours. Naturally, this proposal has raised questions about how much power school officials should have over a student’s life outside of the classroom.

LAPD Using Social Media to Find Los Angeles Looters

As we predicted last week Friday, the Los Angeles Police Department has begun wading through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to identify individuals responsible for rioting in the aftermath of the Los Angeles Lakers’ NBA Championship victory. Over the last several years, social media technology has become an increasingly critical tool for law enforcement officials in their fight against crime.

FTC Rep Says U.S. Privacy Laws Aren’t Working

Speaking on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, Kathryn Ratte recently went on record saying that existing U.S. privacy laws aren’t working as they should and that there’s “too much burden on the consumers” to understand privacy policies that vary widely from one company to the next. Ratte’s comments come in anticipation of a long-awaited report detailing recommendations to Congress on improvements to our current privacy laws.

On Tuesday, ReputationDefender General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer David Thompson appeared as a guest at the ACM Computers Freedom & Privacy Conference in San Jose, California, to talk about Internet privacy issues and to deliver ReputationDefender’s proposed “Social Media Bill of Rights.”

We are happy to report that many of our proposals have been mirrored in the official draft of the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights for the conference. Check out the full text of the proposal below.

We the users expect social network sites to provide provide us the following rights in their Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and implementations of their system:

1. Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service.

2. Clarity: Ensure that policies and terms of service are easy to understand.

3. Freedom of speech: Don’t censor without a clear policy and justification.

4. Empowerment: Support privacy-enhancing and assistive technologies.

5. Security: Treat my data as securely as your own, and notify me if it is compromised.

6. Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others.

7. Control: Let me control my data, and don’t share it with others unless I agree first.

8. Predictability: Don’t change who or what sees my data without my consent.

9. Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.

10. Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.

11. Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal disciplinary actions.

12. Right to leave: Allow me to delete my account, and take my data with me.

Currently, conference attendees and Internet viewers are debating the proposal. To join the discussion, visit the official CFP conference website here or follow along on Twitter and Facebook.  Once the debate has concluded, the amended Bill of Rights will be put to a vote. We will update this post with the finalized language at that time.