On top of being a place where productivity goes to die, Facebook can also be the harbinger of terrible news.
You could find out your significant other is cheating on you, or that you’re single and the last to know about it, or get grounded because your best friend put pictures of you with 40oz bottles of malt liquor duct taped to your hands at that party you promised your parents you wouldn’t go to.
But in Australia, things can be a lot worse. You could find out you’re homeless.
The Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court ruled last Friday that Facebook is a perfectly acceptable medium to deliver a legally binding summons in. So I guess it’s lucky that Facebook describes itself as a place to connect with the people in your life . . . makes it easier to find a couch to sleep on.
It’s really not a huge leap for something like this to happen in Australia. According to a story released by the AP, it’s already permissible for people to be served legal documents through email and even text messages (what do those texts look like?
“WTF? U owe me $ 4 ur mortgage”).
What’s really noteworthy about this story is how it redefines social networking sites and whether or not people will run screaming from them if the law decides kick down the door to a person’s happy place on Facebook to drag them to court.
It’s understandable that people might have concerns with a social networking site being used to invade privacy, but let’s not forget that the WHOLE POINT of serving any sort of summons or eviction notice is to drag a person out of their private happy place and into a courtroom.
That’s why it’s called a “summons,” because you’ve been summoned somewhere.
And while we’re at it, it might be kind of hard to claim an invasion of privacy on a Website like Facebook, where the enjoyment of everything it has to offer is directly proportionate to how popular you are in the first place.
Who joins a social networking site to be left alone? Isn’t that pointless?
So if this sort of thing ever happens here in the states (it might take a while but I don’t see why it wouldn’t) just remember that privacy isn’t something the Internet owes you. In fact, the Internet was designed to reach out and find things . . . including people, people.
Besides, Facebook isn’t going to stop this. Facebook released a statement to the press saying, “We’re pleased to see the Australian court validate Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication. The ruling is also an interesting indication of the increasing role that Facebook is playing in people’s lives.”
See? They’re actually proud of this. So if anyone else out there in the world has important news to deliver–a summons, eviction notice, changes to a last will and testament, outstanding medical bills, court ordered alimony payments or restraining orders, log in and set up an account. They’re here to help.
Because Facebook is no longer a place where productivity dies, but a person’s livelihood, credit rating and future as well.
And according to some very unexpected messages I got today, it seems it’s also my birthday.
Which is strange, because unless my parents were lying to me, I believe I was born in November. Yet, when I finally woke up today and checked in with the Internets, I found eight messages waiting for me, wishing me a happy birthday.
The first actually came yesterday afternoon before 6 p.m. my time, and it was from a former CNET News colleague. I was confused, but thought that perhaps it was a birthday message that got lost in a wormhole back in November and finally figured out how to find its way through the Tubes to my inbox. These things happen.
But the sign that something odd was truly happening came today when, in my e-mail in-box there was a message posted from a friend to a list I’m on, also wishing me a happy birthday.
This got me wondering. The first message, from the former co-worker, had actually been delivered via Facebook. And then, when I checked my e-mail again just now, there were notes informing me that six friends on Facebook had written on my wall, all wishing me, well, you know.
The topper, finally, was the note I found when I logged into Facebook, from the Facebook “team.”
By now, I knew what was going on. When I signed up for Facebook, I entered my birthday, as I often do on Web sites that ask for it, as January 1. I do that because it’s easy for me to remember, because it’s sort of close to my real birthday, and most importantly, because there’s no way I’m giving a Web site my real birthday.
Hello! Identity theft, anyone?
In the past, this has never come back to me in any way. To be sure, I know that by submitting a false birthday, I’m probably violating sites’ terms of service, and now maybe I’ll be kicked off Facebook. But still, I value my privacy and have no intention of revealing a piece of information that is very useful to anyone wishing to do harm with it.
Then again, there’s all these wonderful friends — not to mention the Facebook team — who were nice enough to notice it is my “birthday” today. What to do about them?
Well, I guess the answer is to out myself, and say that this is a totally unexpected artifact of my attempt to maintain some privacy while also using Web sites that want to leverage the use of my personal data. And yours, of course.
I’ve always wondered why sites like Facebook need to know my birthday, and my uninformed answer was a combination of security and micro-targeting.
And in most cases, it’s never come up. But with a site like Facebook, where the social factor in things like this come to the fore, it obviously does come up, and it makes me wonder. Do most people put in their real birthday? Don’t they worry about the consequences? Or maybe there aren’t really any consequences. It’s not, after all, as though giving out your birthday is the same as revealing your Social Security number or your mother’s maiden name.
But with so many of these birthday messages today, I guess I’m seeing that that little piece of information does have a social purpose. Will that get me to change it (assuming Facebook doesn’t kick me off for lying)? Not a chance.
I mean, hey, how else can you get people to celebrate your birthday twice a year? I’ll take my presents now please
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A state appeals court ruled Tuesday that a person who is voluntarily nude in the presence of another still has privacy rights against being secretly videotaped, in a decision that bolsters Wisconsin’s video voyeur law.
The ruling upholds the felony guilty plea of Mark Jahnke, who videotaped his girlfriend while she was naked and while they were having sex. He argued in his appeal that because the woman agreed to be naked around him, she had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
The state Department of Justice argued that shared intimacy does not give a person the right to film another unknowingly.
Jahnke’s attorney, Michael Herbert of Madison, argued that the court had found in a previous case that a reasonable expectation of privacy existed when a nude person reasonably believed he or she was “secluded from the presence of others.”
Prosecutors argued the video voyeur law would make no sense under that interpretation. The appeals court agreed, saying the definition in the previous case was not intended to cover all circumstances.
Judge Charles Dykman, the dissenter in the 2-1 decision, said the 2001 law does not specifically prohibit what Jahnke did.
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen praised the ruling.
“Wisconsin’s citizens enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy not to be secretly videotaped while in the nude, and Wisconsin’s criminal law has been correctly interpreted to protect that expectation,” he said.
Herbert said he did not know whether the case would be appealed to the state Supreme Court.
In April 2007, Jahnke pleaded guilty to illegally making a nude recording. He was sentenced to three years’ probation and six months in jail, which was put on hold pending his appeal.
He was a Waunakee High School chemistry teacher but negotiated a resignation after school officials voted to fire him.
Jahnke’s ex-girlfriend said she became suspicious when she saw a flash of a red light from beneath a pile of clothes in her bedroom. She complained to Stevens Point police, who searched Jahnke’s house and seized 33 audio tapes of the couple having sex and three DVDs. One showed the couple having sex, and two showed the woman nude in her home.
HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.
Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.
Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.
The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the questions its users will ask.
And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.
The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.
In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, proved that there was a wealth of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides in San Francisco. It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.
It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.
Sense has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.
The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.
“There is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured,” said Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. “We were able to look at people moving around stores” and other locations. Such travel patterns, coupled with data on incomes, can give retailers early insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors’ stores.
Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects.
The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab’s technologies to improve businesses’ efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization’s work than was generally believed.
Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, Dr. Pentland said. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that overhauls organizations via the researchers’ techniques.
Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.
Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.
ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.
The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.
Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.
But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.
Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.
In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant chances that it would be misused, “This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.”
For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.
“Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. “But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the impact that data collection has on groups of individuals and not simply a single person.”
Mr. Brown, for one, isn’t concerned about losing his privacy. The M.I.T researchers have convinced him that they have gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal his identity.
Besides, he says, “the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs.”
“This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,” he adds.
GOOGLE and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.
At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a Web service they call a Personal Environmental Impact Report to build a community map of air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to let people assess how their activities affect the environment and to make decisions about their health. Users may decide to change their jogging route, or run at a different time of day, depending on air quality at the time.
“Our mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously unobservable,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a computer scientist at U.C.L.A.
But Dr. Estrin said the project still faced a host of challenges, both with the accuracy of tiny sensors and with the researchers’ ability to be certain that personal information remains private. She is skeptical about technical efforts to obscure the identity of individual contributors to databases of information collected by network sensors.
Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capability, she said. The researchers encrypt the data to protect against identifying particular people, but that has limits.
“Even though we are protecting the information, it is still subject to subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses,” she said.
She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. “I can imagine a system where the data will disappear,” she said.
Already, activist groups have seized on the technology to improve the effectiveness of their organizing. A service called MobileActive helps nonprofit organizations around the world use mobile phones to harness the expertise and the energy of their participants, by sending out action alerts, for instance.
Pachube (pronounced “PATCH-bay”) is a Web service that lets people share real-time sensor data from anywhere in the world. With Pachube, one can combine and display sensor data, from the cost of energy in one location, to temperature and pollution monitoring, to data flowing from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, S.C., all creating an information-laden snapshot of the world.
Such a complete and constantly updated picture will undoubtedly redefine traditional notions of privacy.
DR. PENTLAND says there are ways to avoid surveillance-society pitfalls that lurk in the technology. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.
At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights must also be weighed against the public good.
Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened, providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.
“If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,” he said. “I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”
Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.
“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
Photos documenting last week’s wild party or a quick rant about work frustrations could cost someone a job if an employer spots them online, experts warned at a privacy conference Monday in Calgary.
Despite the potential career perils of social networking sites such as Facebook or Nexopia, a Ryerson study shows 90 per cent of young Canadians are connecting online, seemingly oblivious to the minefield their personal posts can create.
“There seems to be a different awareness of privacy (among young users),” Philippa Lawson, director of the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, told dozens of business representatives gathered for the two-day private sector privacy conference.
“They think the information should be treated as private, even if it’s technically not.”
Alberta’s privacy commissioner, Frank Work, isn’t aware of any formal complaints of Albertans losing their job due to Facebook posts or pictures, but he knows it has occurred elsewhere.
“We can try to regulate the sites better, try to educate the users better and try to get businesses more enlightened about this . . . but at the end of the day this is the brave new world. The coming generation loves it. It’s their technology and we’re not going to stop them,” said Work.
Surfing online at Eau Claire mall, Facebook-user Bonnie Pavlovich knows there are security settings she could engage — but she doesn’t bother with them.
“I’m pretty open. I don’t have anything strange on there, but I know some people can belong to certain groups which point to certain interests that maybe they wouldn’t really want everyone to know,” she said.
Brian Pike takes the opposite approach to posting personal information online. The IT worker uses business networking sites for business but steers clear of them for personal use.
Both agree younger users tend to ignore the dangers of sharing too much online.
“The younger crowd doesn’t worry about it, (but) by the time they get older in life they’ll realize the stuff they posted five years ago is still floating around on the Internet,” he said.
“I think people have to be really careful (about) what they post now because I think it is going to come back to you in the future.”
Getting embarrassing information taken off websites years later can be difficult, said Toronto-based lawyer Jason Young.
Individuals can write to the website owner and ask that the item be removed. They can also contact search engines requesting the information be purged from cached sites, but there is no guarantee it will be taken down.
“It’s a process, even if it works, that can take many, many months. In many cases you are left at the discretion of the owners of the site. If they choose not to remove the information, there’s not a lot you can do,” Young said.
Not all employers are heading straight to Facebook or Nexopia before making hiring decisions.
Telus doesn’t surf social networking sites for information about prospective candidates over concerns the material may not be reliable, Telus chief privacy officer Kevin Doyle said at the conference. The telecommunications company also isn’t convinced existing privacy legislation would permit using data uploaded on Facebook as part of the hiring process, he said.
Work hopes more companies take this approach to respecting the online lives of their employees.
With an increasing number of people blogging, twittering and sharing photos online, Work warns employers could have little choice but to accept the online openness of their staff.
Companies searching for potential staff with squeaky-clean digital personas may soon find there’s no one out there left to hire, he said.
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