Privacy
Discussion:
Danah Boyd on why privacy is different in online spaces
In physical spaces, different audiences don't mix and we can perform differently. However, in the context of Networked Sociality, this changes, argues Danah Boyd
From Danah Boyd in the IDC mailing list, February 2007:
"In unmediated spaces, there are walls that allow us to separately contextualize different situations without dealing with the ramifications of those collisions. Online, no such walls. This is a new architecture. So, people have two choices: go into hyper paranoid mode and constantly try to think about what it means to be seen by all people across all time OR live your life in the context you think it should be and hope that you can convince others of this later. (This can be called the ostrich solution.) The problem is that living your life in a pristine manner imagining yourself on the path to presidency (or at least a good behavior patch) is no fun. It's especially no fun for teenagers who are trapped at home and want to hang out with their peers and their only hang out place is online.
There are two populations that complicate the lives of teens: those who hold power over them (parents, teachers, future employers) and those who want to prey on them (primarily marketers). How do you teach people how to behave with such mixed audiences?"
Case Studies
Summary [1] of a presentation by Alessandro Acquisti [2]:
"Alessandro Acquisti , Carnegie Mellon University, delighted us with great insights about “Imagined communities: awareness, information sharing and privacy: the Facebook case” . His research is in the economics of privacy and he revealed interesting facts about Facebook, for example, 89% of Facebook users reveale their real name. And 87% of CMU Facebook profiles reveale birthday, 51% reveale the address, 40% reveale their phone number (40%!). 61% of the posted images are suited for direct identification. Remember that this information will never disappear, it will stored forever in many computers (facebook servers, google servers, archive.org servers and … as the following discussion easily revealed, governments servers, secret agencies servers and probably many companies who can just afford to save everything and decide in future what to do with this information). There is an evident privacy risk of re-identification: 87% of US population is uniquely identified by {gender, ZIP, date of birth} (Sweeney, 2001), Facebook users that put this information up on their profile could link them up to outside, de-identified data sources Facebook profiles often show high quality facial images, Images can be linked to de-identified profiles using face recognition. Some findings on Facebook: Non members rate privacy (concerns, worries, importance) statistically significantly (although only slightly) higher than members. Members deny they use Facebook for dating, however they state they think other members use it for dating. Majority agrees that the information other Facebook members reveal may create a privacy risk for them (mean Likert 4.92). They are significantly less concerned about their own privacy (mean Likert 3.60). Respondents trust the Facebook… more than they trust unconnected Facebook users. The survey about how much users know about Facebook’s privacy policy is interesting as well: “Facebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site.” 67% believe that is not the case. “We use the information about you that we have collected from other sources to supplement your profile unless you specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done.” 70% believe that is not the case." (http://www.gnuband.org/2007/06/26/report_of_conference_on_e-identity_social_issues_in_social_networking_trust_and_reputation/)
More Information
See our entry on Open Privacy standards.