Tag Archives: Facebook

Owning your data

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Yesterday Facebook and the FTC came to an agreement on privacy settings. This will require Facebook to undergo privacy audits twice a year by a third party firm. In Europe Facebook users are already able to download their data as I mentioned in a previous post. I think we’re living in an age where users will need to be well educated on the impact of the privacy policies of websites on the users personal data. However, how can we do this? I personally never look at the privacy policy on a website. Why? Because I don’t really trust them. Effectively, just by going to the website I agree to these policies and effectively whatever is stated in the privacy information I’m bound to. However, I have to go to the website before I can read it, thus creating a catch-22.

If I did disagree with something written in the privacy policy, I’ve already agreed to accept their terms and if they said “we’re going to steal all your cookies and sell them for profit” and I object to that it’s too late. They already did it.

This puts us users in a bind. We enjoy the benefits of cookies. We don’t have to always remember our passwords, we automatically get logged into our favorite websites. Personal settings pop up as soon as we log in. There are plenty of benefits from using cookies. We lose all of these as soon as we use services like Incognito from Google Chrome. Some of my readers have commented that they have switched to using an Incognito window, but it’s much more of a pain to log into Facebook and they have actually started using the service less. In terms of Facebook to compensate I use TweetDeck which pulls my news feed from both twitter and Facebook. However, it doesn’t get everything including messages from friends, which is annoying, but not the end of the world.

To deal with these privacy issues, the EU is proposing a pan-European standard for privacy policies that a website has to get approved. Companies like Facebook are actively fighting against this rule. I think that this is a great step. I know a lot of people don’t like new government regulations. However, in this case the public is woefully uninformed and find getting informed on these topics cumbersome. A lot of money is being made off of people’s ignorance. Now, many people would say that’s their fault for not properly investigating this topic.

There are a few resources out there to help with getting a better understanding of how to protect yourself. The EFF has an entire section of their website devoted to privacy issues. The ACLU has a Technology and Liberty section which includes topics like privacy.

So why should we care about this? If you aren’t doing anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about. I’m sorry, but this is a really naive way of looking at privacy issues. Some of you readers out there have fences in your back yard. Many of them are called privacy fences, if you aren’t doing anything wrong why do you have a fence? Others will have a safe to store valuables and important documents, why do you need a safe, if you aren’t doing anything wrong you shouldn’t need a safe.

Putting this into a physical context highlights the absurdity of the not doing anything wrong argument. It also highlights the differences between privacy in the physical world and in the digital world. It’s really easy to understand how to increase your privacy at home build a fence, better curtains better locks, bars on your windows etc.. Fixing privacy on your computer is much more difficult. Security experts have tried to make things as simple as possible by using names like Virus scanner, Firewall etc.  Most people don’t really know how to use these properly.

Adding a Firewall to your computer can make using it difficult and clunky. Services that you use frequently suddenly stop working correctly and it’s not always obvious why at first. There needs to be a movement within security companies to make everything as simple as possible for the broader population. There should be advanced settings for the people who really want to control their data. Basically we need the firewall to turn into a fence for most people but with settings to turn it into the Berlin Wall if an advanced user wants it.

All users need to understand the risks, just like they need to understand risks of burglary, they shouldn’t need to be a security expert though.

Other potential resources (I have no idea if they are any good, I just searched for privacy resources)
http://www.privacyresources.org/
http://epic.org/privacy/privacy_resources_faq.html
https://www.privacyinternational.org/article/ephr-privacy-resources

Amazon’s Silk

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Interesting read on Tech Dirt on Amazon.com’s Silk browser. They note that it’s a copyright infringement suit waiting to happen. If you’re too lazy to read the article, basically Silk will copy whatever website you go to onto it’s servers so it can send you a compressed version of it. For instance if a website that you’re on has a 3mb picture they’ll send you a 50kb picture instead. This does a few things. First, it will help relieve congestion on cell networks because smaller pieces of information are being sent. Second, it will save you data if you don’t have an unlimited data package. Finally, it could violate copyright. Why? Because it’s copying everything from a website and then sending you the information from a different source. Not only that, but it is effectively altering the picture they are sending you. I’m not sure if there have been any copyright cases based on compressing the quality of a picture, but for all intents and purposes it’s altering the picture. It probably should fall under fair use, but you never know some one will probably try to sue over that.

There are some other issues to consider too. The browser has predictive capabilities based off of aggregate users actions. This is actually fairly similar to what Facebook is doing, but there are no implications for ads with Amazon (at this point we don’t know if they store individual user statistics). The example they give on the website, is if you go to NYTimes.com and a high percentage of users then click on the business section Amazon will pre-load this information into their severs. This could have an impact on big websites’ server loads as well. They could potentially be hit twice for a lot of visits to their site. If Amazon predicts incorrectly, then it will hit the server at least twice.

Another interesting consideration is related to ad revenue. Let’s say users of some website like, I don’t know KBMOD.com, always visit a YouTube account after reading the front page, let’s go with InfiniteSadd, which would then auto play the video that’s on top. This of course have the ad pop up on the bottom. Now the question I have is in these situations would this count as a click, or would the ads start to filter out views and click throughs from Silk? The situation, I presented is unlikely as there’s no direct link from KBMOD to InfiniteSadd’s user profile. But’s easy to image that it could work that way.

I’d really like to know more about the user statistics that Silk will be collecting. Since the browser is going to be on their Fire device (who knows could also be an update for older Kindles as well), Amazon will know who is browsing what you are browsing and may actually keep that information in your account to predict your behavior better. I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t collect that data. I would imagine that it’s very technologically feasible to use a larger aggregate dataset for websites you don’t frequent, but for your most commonly visited websites for Amazon to have enough usage to figure out where you’re going to go next.

I think the browser is a great idea. However, I can also see this turn into another way for Amazon to better target your recommendations. If you are on your Fire and they see where you go, then they will also know what other products you might be interested in that you haven’t bought through Amazon before. If they know what interests you then they can put those into your “Silk based recommendations.” Now there hasn’t been any talk of that yet, but since they are selling the product at a loss they need you to buy a decent amount of product to get a return on their investment. I’ve seen two values, $50 and $10 losses.

Keep your eyes open for news on this, it could be a copyright and privacy issue before long.

Facebook dirty filthy liars

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Facebook has patented the ability to continue tracking users after they have left their website. Despite this Facebook repeatedly claimed that they were not in the business of tracking their users. However, Facebook’s business is knowing their product as well as possible. You are their product. They are extremely interested in knowing everything they can about you. Why? It’s really simple. The more they know about their user’s online browsing activities the better they can customize ads for you. I imagine that they will create some pretty sophisticated models to determine who will click what sorts of ads. The more people click the more accurate the ad targeting will become.

While individual users do have a web “fingerprint” as the EFF puts it, people will typically browse the same types of websites together. For example people who play fantasy football will be going to yahoo! sport (or some other competing service), they then visit sites like espn, sports illustrated and probably a few sports blogs to try to figure out the best way to get an edge in their game this weekend. Facebook will take this data and aggregate it for a larger set of data. As there are 800 million facebook users and millions of players of fantasy sports, this data could be extremely useful for Facebook to use in placing ads. From these data they may be able to determine which sports team you’re interested in, which players are on your fantasy team, and then display ads for jersey’s from that team or for a specific player. They will also be able to figure out which ads will have an higher likelihood of someone with your browsing profile to click on.

Facebook will then be able to set a premium for ads that they do this with, or they will earn more money from the number of clicks a given ad gets. This of course is why Facebook has decided to collect this data. Some of it seems harmless enough. It’s not that big of a deal that Facebook is getting my fantasy football information, why should I care? Well, you don’t just use the internet for fantasy football, you use it for banking, shopping and a plethora of other activities. Do you know what data facebook is collecting? I certainly don’t. From the patent it is unclear what protections they are providing on the data they are collection. It also doesn’t say what data they will be collecting when you visit a third party site.

As a personal precaution I have started to use Facebook in a separate instance of Chrome using the Incognito function. This prevents my browsing history from being saved and deletes many cookies. I have also taken to deleting all my cookies every time I close my browser. I don’t do it myself Chrome does it for me. Additionally, these settings are available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I suggest that you look into doing similar safety measures to prevent Facebook from getting information from you that you don’t want them to have.

Finally, the other thing that isn’t really discussed in many places that mention the ads, this data is also being provided to law enforcement agencies. Now of course there’s the whole if you aren’t doing anything wrong then you don’t have to worry about anything. However, this worries me regardless because I’m losing my control over what information is going to the government and companies. I don’t like that. Patents like this one and cookies that record our daily activities are changing our private life into our public life.

On Being the Product

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Today I’ve read and reposted a few articles (another) about users being the final product for several companies. These of course are facebook, twitter, google (in various forms including plus), yelp and the list goes on. Personally, I think that the claims that we are only the product is a bit of simplification. There is no doubt that we are the product, however, it’s also a matter of to whom are we the product? For instance, my blog, which I post on facebook, twitter and Google Plus allows others to be consumers of my content. The people who are my friends, followers or in my circles are able to consume my content. We are not merely products to companies, but we are products for other people as well.

We consume what are friends put out there. We have habits an manners in which we’d like to be able to consume that information. However, we’re running into a bidirectional problem. We’re losing control over what information we’re sharing and we’re losing control over how we consume this information. In Tom Anderson’s (of myspace fame) post about the changes in facebook, he mentions something called seamless sharing, where you have to do nothing and it’s instantly shared. This, to me, raises all sorts of privacy concerns. In this TED talk the speaker addresses the problem of filtering algorithms in google and facebook.

I think it’s very obvious that Facebook still realizes that we’re consumers of the information. For without our work as the product, posting links, pictures and statuses, there’d be no facebook. However, without us as consumers reading various different posts and clicking related links there’d also be no facebook. The product we are to non-fellow consumers comes down to our network, what the people in our network are interested in and whatever information that is automatically shared with facebook through our web browser.

We need to be aware that this trend is going to continue. We as users and consumers need to fight to get control over our data and the right to control what we share when we share it. This gets back to my points in my earlier blog posts about pseudonyms and truly being anonymous on the web. If you are interested in knowing at least some of the information that you’ve shared on facebook over the years in some countries you are able to download a copy of your facebook history. I haven’t done so yet, but I plan on it. If it is not available in your country, try to get the rights to your data.

While facebook is using you as a product, you still should have the right to demand the information they have on you and are selling to 3rd parties. Being the product isn’t fun, however, it’s nothing new. We’ve been the product for years and have never really complained. The difference now, is that the information about your personally has never been better and is only going to get better the more you give them. For free.