Really have to watch PORN on the metro???

This morning, 6:45AM... When the sun is rising, people are dressed up, the center of politics of the nation is waking up... I was on the metro; yellow line heading to DC. There was this normal looking guy (proly in his early 50s?) sitting perpendicularly in front of me (the seatings on the metro in DC is a bit different to the one in Europe or Asia) was looking into his cell phone very "seriously."

When the metro was going through an area with bad reception, he was shaking the phone (yes people do this thinking this action will improve the reception ;)) and the monitor of the phone was visible from where I was sitting at. Next moment, the monitor comes back to its life. very "vividly." It was obviously a piece of porn picture. (for more details about this pic. please e-mail the writer. I dont feel like to go into details on this blog. :p)

Ok. he is a grown up. has all the rights to watch porn on his personal mobile device. BUT it was 6:45 in the morning at a public place!

While I was in slight panic, he gazed at a girl sitting across from him. O. M. G. what would he be thinking????? Fantasizing a sex with her?????? (To my already puzzled eyes, he was licking her with his eyes!!!) GRRRRR ok. no tolerance at this point.

So I tabbed on his upper arm and said "I think you can watch that at more private places." (Oh, brave me! ;))
He was looking at me stunned and stammered "Wha,what are you talking about? I'm looking at my facebook." I did not say anything, but he stood up and moved to another seat far from where I was at. Somehow I was deeply disturbed by this situation.

Here is my question:

Do you think it is ok to watch porn in public places where your smartphone monitors are huge and can be glimpsed by other people including old papas & mamas AND YOUR CHILDREN?????

Can somebody do something about it? PLEASE??

What Happens in Facebook Doesn't Stay in Facebook

During the last 2/3 of this semester, I have talked about privacy on this blog. So I have decided to talk about Facebook and privacy as my "finale" of the semester. I might keep writing on this blog after the semester is over, so don't forget to keep coming back!! 

Facebook - The Online Profile that Gets You

According to a research study, there are more than 100 pieces of privacy-related information on Facebook’s online profile, including the user’s gender, marital status, age, number of friends, jobs, schools, profile photos, and so on.

Just less than ten years ago, when the world was introduced to Second Life(2003), World of War Craft(2004), and some other early stage social media, an Internet user’s online identity was still not very closely tied to the user’s actual identity. Although some of the users wondered about the real identity of the people that they met online, it really did not matter what you pretended to be on the Internet; at least it did not risk your job as your online profile was not taken very seriously.  

Now, when about half of Americans are on Facebook, and our devices help us upload our real life in real time, the nature of one’s Facebook identity and profile becomes somewhat different. It tends to resemble the user’s real life identity. Also, when the online society is closer to real world society, what is put out there onto the Internet is now considered as a serious reflection of real life.

Also, according to Boyd and Ellison, what makes social media unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make their social networks visible. The backbone of social media networks consists of visible profiles. If you are in a social media network, sharing certain profile information in the network is inevitable, as social networking is somewhat restricted otherwise.

Online profiles are usually (at least partially) visible to the public and it is oftentimes viewed by employers, recruiters, supervisors and, of course, friends and family members. Then how seriously it is taken? Depending on how you present yourself, it might cost you your job. Recently, there was a court case in which the plaintiffs asserted that they were let go because of what they “liked” on Facebook, and Facebook profile viewing is now raising legal questions regarding privacy. This one-minute news video illustrates this issue:

However, the fact that the users have to reveal a certain amount of personal information to the world is not the biggest concern. The real concern is actually what the social media platform providers are doing to collect their users' private data and how they use/share it. 

On one of my past blog posts, I mentioned that Benkler has a way too positive point of view regarding the effect that the Internet and online community might have on us. As Benkler said, social media and other Internet tools may give us a better ability to publish and also to connect to each other, but this belies the fact that all the communities are now gathered into a very few service providers, and those service providers are businesses, which means they are aiming to make money.

One thing Benkler failed to consider in his calculation is the following:
Everything on the Internet is run by human beings, and there has to be central places to have the infrastructure work; for example, power hubs, servers, database storage, etc. All these core infrastructures are businesses and they aim to create revenue off of it. As an online business, social media platforms are not exceptions. While most of the social media services are free of monetary charge to individual users, they are asking for a different type of payment: your personal information.

What Happens in Facebook Doesn't Stay in Facebook 

- The Secret of the "Like" Button -

It has never really been a secret that Facebook collects our personal information, but did you know how? How many times did you click the "Like" button knowing that the action will allow the like button leave cookies on your browser to keep transferring your online behavior from that point on  for up to two years? Maybe you didn't know this until now.

Not only does your selection of the “Like” button show up on your friend's Facebook page as shown in this image below, it also keeps transferring your online behavior to Facebook and others.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are informed each time a user visits a webpage that contains one of these company’s widgets, for example, Facebook’s “Like” and Twitter’s “Tweet” buttons.  These tools also let the makers (the companies and webpages that you click the "Like" button for) collect data about the websites you are visiting. The "Like" button notifies Facebook that you visited those sites even when you do not click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal. This is how it works:

Facebook stores the collected data for two weeks. The data isn’t recorded in a way that can be tied back to a user, unless the user decides to “like” a webpage. Facebook asserts that they anonymize the data, but Warden (Pete Warden got his fame by scraping Facebook data!) says in an informative O’Reilly Radar essay that anonymizing data is harder than it sounds, and supposedly “anonymous” data sets have been successfully de-anonymized on several occasions. 

I mentioned above that Facebook is raising legal questions. As a matter of fact, the “Like” button indeed raised its own case in Europe. In August 2011, northern Germany announced that the "Like" button, with its ability to track a user’s movement across the Internet, violates German and European privacy law. 

Yet Facebook wants us to share more.

A Well Designed Strategy?

Facebook wants us to share more personal information with more people/(business) entities, so that they can place more micro-targeted advertisements on their sites and charge more money to the sponsors. The 2011 ad revenue of Facebook was over 4 billion dollars, and experts estimate the company's 2012 ad revenue will easily surpass 5 billion dollars. Make no mistake. They make their revenue by selling the users' information to their sponsors. 

Although, unlike other social media, Facebook is giving the impression that users have control over their privacy settings and have control over the visibility of the pages, the big social media platform has been changing its privacy policy constantly without users' consent. And it has consistently progressed towards one direction: lowering the bars to access to personal information. If you follow this link, you can see a brief summary of their privacy policy change that I previously posted on this blog, and if you follow this link, you can see in a timeline what Facebook has done with the privacy settings over the years as new features have been released.

Facebook recently launched the "ticker" feature on the site and it shows all the Facebook activities of the user’s friends. When the user moves the mouse over the activity, it shows details of the activity, which oftentimes contains the content of a “friend of a friend.”

Through the ticker, I was able to view activities of many people to whom I had no connection at all. The ticker has been in place since a few months ago with no advance notice or announcement. It was open like in the picture by default, but as of yesterday (May 9, 2012) it was collapsed by default with the expandable + mark on the right hand corner.

Privacy scholars Zimmer and Hoofnagle argued, in an op-ed, that the Facebook's privacy missteps are not examples of privacy clumsiness but are a successful strategy. They said Facebook follows the pattern of taking two steps forward with an aggressive misuse of personal information and creeping back the slightest bit once the criticism emerged. 

What Is The Problem? 

The real problem here is that we do not know "what information of our own is shared by doing what" on Facebook. While Facebook is taking advantage of their user information, the users have no idea what information is transferred to where/whom. We can always file a lawsuit against Facebook, if what they are doing is illegal. However, there are no clear legal standards or regulatory action on online privacy as of today. As lawsuits are reactionary, more robust regulations are in urgent need. Do people care about it? It seems like they do, as the following short video suggests:

The other problem and what really concerns me (and many others) about Facebook's arguably aggressive data aggregation is how safe all the data Facebook collects is. So far, there has been no major crisis in North America, but Facebook reported that it discovered a malicious code planted by the secret police of Tunisia that collected the passwords of every Tunisian citizen with a Facebook account, allowing them to hack into the Facebook profile of any citizen considered to be a political threat. This hack revealed contacts, who in turn become new targets of interest for the secret police.  As Morrozov said, aggregation of data may simply make the work of an authoritarian regime handy.

What Should I Do?  

Well... it is not easy to come up with one answer. For now, if you care about privacy, I will have to tell you that you should clear your cache on your browser as often as you can. Do not keep clicking the "Like" button for no reason and do not keep yourself logged in unless necessary. There also are some plug-ins like Disconnect that you can install on your browser to prevent unwanted tracking.
In the long run? I strongly support strong regulatory measures at least to disclose what data will be mined by which user action. Don't you think we have a right to be left alone?

*****

Privacy, Cyber Security, and Mobile Devices

When it comes to online privacy, cyber security is an important factor. When all of us are using cellphones in an hourly basis, if not more frequent, we dont really think the possible security issues on the mobile devices. 

According to US-CERT reports, recently, the number of mobile devices sold exceeds the number of personal computers. Also, the number and sophistication of attacks on mobile devices is increasing, yet the countermeasures are slow to catch up. Like this:

So... what do you think a malware can do on a smartphone? Here are the examples: 

Access to email and social networking accounts, address book, personal and confidential files, messages, etc. that are stored on your device 

Besides malware, there are more security threats on mobile devices. Like spyware, viruses, phishing scams, etc. Almost the same as PCs.

Check out this video. This apparently is a good example of what malware is capable of: 

I dont know what you think, but this video, especially when he extracted out the address book from the phone, it really scared me off...

Did you already know all this?? or What do you think?? 

Social Media - Clearer Wather in a Koi Pond

Recently, I read a book titled as International Communication Strategy. Yes. It is a BIG title. But I will not talk about the book. I brought this book up as I would like to mention one episode in the book.

The book briefly (really briefly) talks about how a political opposition group against the regime had 59 Facebook groups, in South Africa, yet they were not able to achieve their objectives for no particular reason.

Here is my question: What does the presence of 59 Facebook group mean????
My answer is "SOMETHING" but "NOTHING."

It is true that social media make a different grouping culture. As I just said, I would only say it is a new grouping culture. 

There are koi fish in the pond!
we simply cannot see what they are donig! 

As grouping is super easy when you are on social media networks, people tend to easily get grouped.

I think this can be explained by an analogy of a koi pond.

Before social media, the crowd was koi fish living in a pond with full of algae.

They were swimming around together, gathering in may different ways and sizes in the pond, but were not really visible from the outside of the pond. Also, the water might have not been clear enough for them to see each other very well.

Now, after the spread of social media, its like the water in the pond is clearer. We can see the koi fish doing all kinds of things in the water. Like this:

so... what does that mean? I would say there are several points we can think of:

1. we can easily find the interest groups that we may be joining
2. we can also see what other people are doing (if only you have enough time to do so lol)
3. at the same time, our enemies(?) can see what we are doing

Then why did I say this means "something but nothing"????

Because I think that what makes the koi fish jump out of the surface of the water has not changed yet; lack of oxygen, or food thrown by someone??

So... I just wanted to say that having more visibility on human's networking behavior and having a tool making it much easier is cool, but it doesn't necessary change the fundamental threshold of actual "movement."

There still has to be enough incentive for crowd to make them take actions...
Of course, unlike a fish pond, there also has to be a leader; someone who can organize and set a clear objective!

However, I do admit having higher transparency is a big change and this will leverage some fundamental changes in the long run. :) We will see how this would contribute to the society.

What do you think?? Now, LEAVE A COMMENT!!!!

Does Google read my e-mails??

Let's say that you are writing your journal on Google doc, and keep talking about something that you want to buy. Like a new car. One day you would realize you are seeing so many car advertisements around you. For example... in Google search ads sections. Creepy?

Regardless you are realizing it or not, this is actually happening.
When you are reading your G-mail, please pay attention to the right side ads column. It picks up vocabularies from your e-mails and decides which ads to show.

Someone, or something is actually reading your "personal(what you think)" stuff!!

According to Professor Reed, although there is no specific legal article that can protect information ownership, there are three legal sources of ownership; IP rights, confidentiality and contract.

Long story short, he says that users need to be aware of what they are getting into when they are online. So... read the terms and conditions on the site!!
At the same time, Reed acknowledges that users have little room to negotiate with the service providers. He says that the service providers need to come up with a governance forum. (I wonder if this will ever happen though...) And he also mentions government regulations could help.

In Europe, there already are many moves regarding cloud computing and legal issues. Check this page out: http://www.cloudlegal.ccls.qmul.ac.uk/



Oh, well... it all sounds right, but how can we stop what Google is already doing in its G-realm?!?
Any body has any ideas?



Professor Reed's ideas in slides:

Information ownership in the cloud

View more documents from Cloud Legal Project

Your Sleep Cycle Info in the Cloud?

I ran into a very interesting article. The article introduced me new devices that (supposedly) help promote the users health. Here are the devices:

1. Nike + Application on iPhone: a software-hardware combo that lives on your iPod or iPhone and collects information about your running history.

Besides helping you build a detailed database of your progress, the program has a major social component, letting you challenge your friends and boast of your achievements in recurring and somewhat annoying Facebook posts.







2. SleepTracker watch:  a smart alarm. The idea is that you set a time to be woken up.

The watch collects your sleep data and then wakes you up at whatever point in that window it senses you’re not in the middle of a deep sleep cycle.

Presumably, because when you’re not woken out of the most restful period of sleep, you wake up more refreshed.

3.  MOTOACTV from Motorola: a kind of Nike+ for multiple exercises. It lets you quickly generate fitness goals for walking, running, cycling, elliptical or step-machine workouts.

An individual can download post-workout data from Motorola on-line hub. That data includes detailed maps showing exactly where you’ve just been running/walking/cycling, coupled with charts showing your rate distance/calories burned/pace.

They all sounds very decent and convenient devices to have around. However, having all the data in their cloud-based server??? I am not sure if that would be the best way to store all "my" data, which the service provider may claim as "their"data.

We need to think about "information ownership."  While all these cool tools are released in competition, the idea behind it usually is these tools need the user information to be operated. 

There is a law professor, Chris Reed, who talked about this. I will talk about his points next week. :)

However, if you can't wait, please feel free to take a look at his slides: http://www.slideshare.net/CloudLegal/reed-cloud-computing-uwe-2011

Will you pay Gmail $9/Month?

If you ever wondered how much your personal information that Gmail collects would worth, one rough figure could be $9.00/month. 

Google took in $37.9 billion in revenue in 2011, and $36.5 billion was from ads. According to an NBC News article, if Google stops collecting personal information, therefore they lose their advertisement income, all the Gmail users will have to pay 9 dollars per month to cover that loss.

A couple days ago (March 26, 2012), the FTC called for industry to develop a voluntary mechanism to let consumers signal they don’t want their data collected by online companies. Bloomberg Businessweek says that Leibowitz (current FTC Chairman) foresees there will be a certain type of tangible "Do-Not-Track" options will be available to consumers in 2012.

Although I support this privacy protection mechanism, and there is no doubt that every individual has to be informed about the data that is being collected about her/himself, I am still wondering what the flashback would be if Gmail, Facebook begin to ask us to pay monthly charges, and also wondering what percentage of people would be willing to pay for the services.

Many may still let the online companies collect their personal information. If Gmail alone charges 9 dollars per month, to opt out from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other will cost several times more than that. I wonder how many people will be happy to pay another bunch of utility bills when they get the same service as before while the leak of personal information is not visible, or does not make their lives unreasonably uncomfortable (although it can be somewhat creepy sometimes).


If the implementation of this mechanism becomes a mandatory requirement for the business, the wordings on their data sharing terms and conditions (in exchange of user info) will be very interesting things to pay attention to along with the user responses. 

Google Plus Circle Management

As Google+ Circles were so annoying, I did some experiments and research to find out a couple of ways to minimize the exposure. If one wants the highest publicity and wants to be included in other circles, this post many help you do the opposite. lol (so, please do the opposite)

Limit Visibility of the Circles You Are in:

1. Go to this page: https://www.google.com/settings/privacy?tab=4 (login required)

2. Find the following section and set the visibility:

(The following screen-shot shows google+ default setting)

 

Limit Shared Content:

1. Go to this page: https://www.google.com/settings/plus#  (login required)

2. Find the following section and decide which circle(s) can share your postings:

(The following screen-shot shows google+ default setting)

 Also Edit "Photos" section on the same page:

(The following screen-shot shows google+ default setting) 

 

These findings look not that much information, but it took quite a while to find the locations! 

Hope this will help.

I also sent a feedback to google wondering if there is anyway to prevent other people from adding  myself into their circles. I will update here if I hear anything from them.

Hope this helps! :)

Google +

So far I found two annoying things on Google+

1. Circling annoys hell out of me:

Anyone can add me in their circle and I will show up when someone else looks at their profile. -> This freaks me out effectively.
I have been trying to figure out how to prevent this from happening.  I will add this on this posting soon as I figure that out.

2. Photo Sharing:


I have a handful of Google+ friends and I did not know if I could see all of their pictures they have ever put on Google service. With my blurry vision, I was not able to see what on earth those were (thumb nails on my 11" laptop). So I randomly clicked a random picture (looked like sky + a red dot) without thinking. It was my colleague/friend's wife in the picture (I guess - sky was ocean and the red dot was her!!) and she was wearing a swim suit!!! And there was a pop-up window that made me go mad saying "Your photo preference has been saved." What the?????? So... all of a sudden my photo preference became looking at my friend's wife's pictures????? I got out of Google+ in less than a second feeling sabotaged...

Ugh... BTW I am writing on Google Blog right at this moment.

Help!!!!

Facebook Gone Wild before Google

After last weeks posting, I began to think about privacy again! and here is why I am concerned about privacy. This month, Google's privacy policy is discussed here and there. However, Google is not the first giant online service who changed its privacy policy when the users are "settled in."

Here is what facebook did from 2005 to 2011 re: their privacy policy.

A quick summary of FB privacy change 2005 - 2011 

***** 

2005: No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings. 

2006: …We understand you may not want everyone … to have the information you share on Facebook; … Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community … 

2007: … Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings… 

2009: Facebook is …to share your information with anyone you want. …You should review the default privacy settings and change them … Information set to “everyone” is publicly available …may be imported and exported by us and others …. The default privacy setting for certain types of information … are set to “everyone.” 

December 2009: … such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone…and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings. 

April 2010: When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. …The default privacy setting for certain types of information … are set to “everyone.”   

  
April 2011: …Facebook is about sharing information with others …. We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you…

*****

I am sure they kept changing it after 2011. Please check FB's current privacy policy here.

As Google now has one privacy policy on tens of products of theirs. Small changes may make a big difference now. Will keep an eye on their privacy policy changes! 

The Trade-offs...

I remember back in 1990s when I was not this much wired, I enjoyed the time hanging out with friends without glancing at a smart-phone. I still remember waiting for a phone call from my friend in London in the middle of a night (and those moments still linger in my memory). Also, it was almost impossible to find static(?) web presence of  my real-life friends on the Internet, unless the friend was a geek with a developed website of her/his own.

Now, checking e-mails more than fourteen times a day, sending hundreds of text messages per month, twitting, facebooking (with all the friends around the world), updating the profile on linked in... now I think: "Is my life enriched by all the information?"

There are things that definitely benefit people.  I wait metro less than before. It is easier to locate an address. I feel more connected to the world. We have all kinds of mobile apps making our lives (in a way) easier...

However, I believe that most of the things are double edged swords. According to an e-mail statistics report, average number of corporate e-mail that one person receives per day is 75 (in 2010).  Seventy-Five "corporate" e-mails every single day per person!!! Some people may receive more than the average, and we all have to do "something" to clean up the inbox.

On social media platforms, everybody is following each other... we all know who is doing what. Also, some smart phones can trace our digital footprints and can tell what we were doing at certain time of a certain day. Not only we are busy updating ourselves and others, we are spending considerable amount of time doing all that, there also is practically no privacy.

Recently, "the right to be deleted" is discussed and also, in Europe, a new law(so called "cookie law") allows people to opt out cookies.  Will the U.S. give its citizens and taxpayers the right to be deleted in the near future? I don't want people to see my silly pictures after my death. Don't we also have right to be anonymous sometimes?

Here is an interesting posting explaining how our privacy is being sold with/without our knowledge.:

Beware of Lollipops from Strange Websites!

Are Social Media Monitoring Mainstream Media?

Are Social Media Monitoring Mainstream Media???

Maybe in part... ????
What I believe is that most of the social media can start stirring up certain issues, but one of the most critical leverage is still the mainstream media; major news channels, news papers, and so on.

(Benkler - from http://benkler.org/Face.html)

Even thought Benkler argues that blogs and other on-line media can do the role of the watchdog... (and he has pretty optimistic view... look at him in the picture! He looks very optimistic!! lol) well... even in his book, The Wealth of Networks, it is apparent that mainstream media played a critical role to leverage the movements. (Look at the graph on page 224 for Sinclair case and the diagram on page 234 for Diebold case of this pdf file (chapter 7 only).)

Not only in Benkler's book, but also in many other cases, mainstream media play more important roles than what we assume. Think about Occupy Wall street, Occupy DC, and some other incidents... although those cases were well known in the social media world, what if it was NEVER picked up by any of the mainstream media?

I believe it is hard to ignore when a majority of people get to know some events/incidents, but there still will be a huge difference depending on weather the event is picked up by major media outlets or not...

This may change, but for now, blogs and other social media outlets can be a source of news, but I wonder if they can really replace any the current mainstream media in the near future...

Just a thought. I may keep looking into this and write a paper????
Any other thoughts??