Privacy Aspects of Social Media

Professor Katchuck COM 330

Eric Bottomley Lorin Reid Anna Sachs Hylie Santos Scott Sutherland Mark Takizawa

As technology continues to advance, it is becoming increasingly easier to communicate with others, as has happened in the recent years with social networks. However, this convenience of virtual communication does not come free, with many expressing their concern over the privacy of their information. In order to understand and define the privacy aspects of social networks, we must first examine what social networks are. According to a definition by PC Magazine Encyclopedia, social networking is an association of people drawn together by a family, work or hobby. More modernly, this definition has grown to encompass a wider circle of contacts, with users able to construct their identity through public or semi-public virtual profiles. Facebook is currently one of the most identified social networks, but the very fundamental concept of social networking existed long before its creation. In the 80s, it all began with BBS, short for the Bulletin Board System. This allowed users to communicate and download files or games through a central system. CompuServe, which began in the 1970s primarily for business use, was another alternative to file sharing and communication, and by the late 80s, it had become a popular site. It allowed users not only to share files and information but also to discuss various topics in online forums. By the 1990s, AOL or America Online users were creating personal profiles as well as constructing online communities a notable precursor to the social networks we see today. By the late 90s and into the turn of the century, many online community platforms began springing up with names like SixDegrees, LiveJournal, AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, Friendster, Skyblog, LinkedIn, Orkut, Myspace, among countless more. While many of these focused primarily on social connections and communication, Facebook, with its opening to the public in 2006, has shown us over time the importance of privacy. The issue was not a major one with the creation of the famed social network, however with its development and growing popularity, many users have become more concerned with what is happening with all of their personal information online.

In a study done by a developer of IBM Researchs Center for Social Software, Matt Mckeon visually shows through pie charts the Evolution of Privacy on Facebook. Starting with 2005, the chart shows that most private information such as wall posts and photos can only be seen by your friends and other networks, but meanwhile, the users name, picture, and networks can be seen by all Facebook users. At this point, nothing is viewable or searchable by the entire Internet. Fastforward five years later, and we see a much different chart. As of April 2010, the users name, wall posts, photos, likes, and friends are available to not only all Facebook users but to the entire Internet. The only things not available are the users contact information and Birthday. However, recent developments have shown that Facebook is moving towards a plan to give websites and third-party developers the access to users private contact information, including their address and phone number. According to a recent article in the Huffington Post, this proposed policy was posted to the Facebook Developer Blog in January, but due to the amount of protest received from users, security experts, and congressmen, repealed the post saying they would be re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks. In response to this controversial article, Facebook has publicized a statement saying: For people that may find this option useful in the future, we're considering ways to let them share this information (for example to use an online shopping site without always having to re-type their address). People will always be in control of what Facebook information they share with apps and websites. With the use of online social networking sites on the rise, millions of people and their families are becoming vulnerable to online attacks. According to the latest Consumer Reports State of the Net study, two out of three online U.S. households are using social networks like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace to share private information. This number has nearly doubled since the last report conducted the previous year. According to recent studies, 47 percent of adults and 26 percent of senior citizens (ages 65 and over) indicate that they now use social networking sites.

Furthermore, it comes as no surprise that the study found 80 percent of teens and young adults (ages 16-25) frequenting social networking sites- making them the largest user demographic. Considering that all users of social networking websites are at risk to online threats such a malware, spam and hackers, it is important to keep personal information sharing to a bare minimum. According to Charles Pavelites, a supervisor at the Internet Crime Complaint Center, criminals are opportunists and they see opportunity in numbers. Wherever there are a lot of users, they will see a lot of opportunities and what it comes down to is how savvy the criminal is versus how savvy the social network is at preventing these threats. Pavelites urges all users to be smart when it comes to the information they post and aware of the current spam circulating between users. Users cannot solely depend on the social networks to filter and prevent all threats from entering the users realm. Within the past year, 9 percent of social network users experienced some form of abuse, such as malware infections, scams, identity theft, or harassment. The report also shows that many users are still nave to the risks involved with sharing sensitive information, 40 percent of users put themselves at risk of identity theft by posting their full birth date, 26 percent of users regularly post pictures of their children accompanied by each childs full name exposing them to possible predators and risk of abduction. Finally, only 1 in 4 households with a Facebook account were not aware of or chose not to use the services privacy controls. (Consumer Reports) The study found that cybercrime costs Americans an average of $4.5 billion dollars over the last two years, causing damage to 2.1 million computers. Furthermore, cybercrime is unavoidable. The social networking services do their best to stay on top of cyber criminals, but ultimately it is up to the consumers to protect themselves. This can be achieved by using updated security software and malware protection, being selective over the information they disclose and staying updated on current scams, threats and privacy policies.

There are so many political aspects of privacy in regards to social media websites. The increasing accessibility of individuals information via social media sites has consequently raised privacy issues, which can be viewed in a political context. First of all, there are no federal privacy laws in the United States to administer the collection of our personal information. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the only agency with authority over such information-gathering; and it can only enforce existing lawsit cannot create new ones (Van Rens, 2010). So, companies like Google are collecting personal information on us from our mobile applications, our Facebooks and our Twitter accounts, etc. Without privacy laws, corporations can store and use that information whenever and however they please; our information becomes fair game. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) set up standards, which say that as long as companies set up reasonable privacy guidelines and the people agree to them, they can collect our information (Sherman, 2011). The companies do have to respect the guidelines that the customer agrees to, but very few people attempt to actually read the Terms of Agreement before they push the agree button, so we are giving up a lot of our privacy rights without even looking into it. Another political aspect of social media is called participatory democracy, which allows people and the government to come together and participate in government decisions. For example, Cassandra Harris a Social Media Specialist of the Hawaii State Senate guest lectured and discusses how our Hawaii State Senate has a Twitter account that they have used in this way. They had a Town Hall like event, however, instead of getting people to come out to a facility, they held it on Twitter. They found that it was helpful because they are able to have a broader and larger participation range and were able to have people address important topics, share their ideas and opinions and even vote (Harris, 8 Feb 2011). Participatory democracy is good because it makes it easier for people to participate in government decisions; it is cost-efficient and can accommodate more people. However, there are negative outcomes of this as well, of which Ms. Harris discussed,

for example, they cant control what kind of content people are posting and how they would censor this information. Next, regarding politics of social media and privacy, there are many politicians who use and have Facebook accounts. They use them for marketing and publicity, including using it heavily in the last Presidential election. However, they have to be very careful about the kinds of things they post because of their social position, plus they have lawyers who are ready at all hours to sue someone to protect them. There are always risks of defamation, which could slander or damage someones reputation (Harris, 8 Feb 2011). Other political aspects of privacy in social media are Intellectual Property Rights and the issues that go along with them. For example, if you take the time to read Googles actual Privacy Laws for Google Docs it says, if you agree to use their service, they get ownership rights of the documents you post (Google, 2010). Also, there are Location Based Services, which can have positive and negative effects. With LBS, people can always know where you are, you could incriminate yourself or even get you fired from a job, etc (Ackerman, 2005). There are even government's in the world who either already control or are trying to control their countries Internet (like what happened in Egypt), as well as censorship issues that go along with that. Technically, privacy in social media doesnt exist. People should download software to prevent computer hackers from accessing information about you. But for people who dont have access to anti malware software, some protocol standards provided by the World Wide Consortium are P3P, PLING, TAMI, and PAW, which are all acronyms for privacy standards and programs. The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, or P3P, is a protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about browsing users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and officially recommended on April 16, 2002 (Wikipedia). P3P enables Websites to

express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents, this allows the user to be informed of site practices (in both machine-and human-readable formats) and to automate decision-making based on these practices when appropriate. On October 3rd 2007, Policy Languages Interest Group was created, which is an open forum to discuss use cases, languages, and frameworks around information governance policies. PLING also serves as a global platform to enable different initiatives to share and exchange ideas about policy interoperability. There are many different languages to express preferences, obligations, and constraints for privacy, access control, identity management, and intellectual property rights. However, in today's networked society people want to "mash up" and combine different content with different policies and share the outcomes with everyone. These challenges require the combination of existing ways to manage the flow of information with new techniques to manage policy interactions. Social Networking is only one example driving these new challenges. The current big efforts around Identity Management can also be explained as being the focal point of policy integration across disparate systems. Users want to have a seamless experience, developers want ease of implementation, and community groups want respect for user rights. The current "islands" can't satisfy that concert of requirements. Integration is clearly needed and starts when all the stakeholders begin talking to each other. The PLING objective is to facilitate this and offer an international platform for policy language discussions (W3C, P3P Project). Transparent Accountable Data-Mining Initiative, The TAMI Project is creating technical, legal, and policy foundations for transparency and accountability in large-scale aggregation and inference across heterogeneous information systems. The incorporation of transparency and

accountability into decentralized systems such as the Web is critical to help society manage the privacy risks arising from the explosive progress in communications, storage, and search technology. The expansion of government use of large-scale data mining for law enforcement and national security provides a compelling motivation for this work. While other investigations of the impact of data mining on privacy focus on limiting access to data as a means of protecting privacy, a variety of social, political, and technical factors are making it increasingly difficult to limit collection of and access to personal information. The TAMI Project is addressing the risks to privacy protection and the reliability of conclusions drawn from increasing ease of data aggregation from multiple sources by creating methods and technologies for adding increased transparency and accountability of the inference and aggregation process itself. The project is developing precise rule languages that are able to express policy constraints and reasoning engines that are able to describe the results they produce (W3C, P3P Project). Policy Aware Web is a rule-based policy management system that can be deployed in the open and distributed milieu of the World Wide Web. It creates a system of a Policy Aware infrastructure for the Web using a Semantic Web rules language (N3) with a theorem proverb designed for the Web (Cwm). This is designed to enable a scalable mechanism for the exchange of rules and, eventually proofs, for access control on the Web. Determining what is ethical within social media is especially difficult considering it is relatively new and few social norms have been established. Because it is ever evolving, there are no rules governing what is right and wrong with regards to our privacy. Ten years ago, we would not have dreamed of the capabilities of the Internet today. The idea of sharing personal information freely with one another was simply not something people would have done online. Within social media, privacy and ethics are highly debated topics and go hand in hand. The question is not simply

was is ethical and what is not, but rather how we decide to define social media ethics in the 21st century. Many of us are aware that Google has a massive database of our habits: which sites we visit and what kinds of topics we are searching, and similarly, Facebook keeps track of all of our Likes. We leave behind a traceable digital footprint, which companies use to create profiles and provide us with advertisements. What many do not know is that these companies thrive off of ad revenue based on this information. In fact, Google reported to have generated 30% or 2.04 billion dollars of their total revenue in the first quarter of 2010 from their AdSense program, which provides users with ads based on website content, geographical location and our browsing habits (Google Investor Relations). And in 2009 alone, Facebook made 500 million dollars in ad revenue (Carlson). There is so much incentive for companies to access and use our personal data, and the average user has little idea about how to prevent their information from them. Because the US has no comprehensive privacy law to govern the collection and use of our personal data, we leave it up to the corporations to self-regulate. Realistically, they could sell our personal information if they wanted to and we would have a difficult time taking legal action against them. In fact, just recently, the Institute for Advertising Ethics published a new online advertising ethics code, which focuses mainly on ways to self regulate the industry. They put forth 8 principles, one of which states that, advertisers should never compromise consumers' personal privacy in marketing communications, and their choices as to whether to participate in providing their information should be transparent and easily made (Snyder). We have moved into an era where it is expected of us to share our data, and socially, we have moved into an age where status updates and comments have become the dialogue of our lives. We often tell new friends to add me on Facebook instead of giving out our number, and instant message each other instead of talking on the phone or in person. Social media are gossip magnets,

and many have no filter when is comes to posting private things on social networks. Even Mark Zuckerberg has stated that privacy is no longer a societal norm. In The Telegraph he is quoted as having said that people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people (Bartnett). Social networking sites do in fact affect our world on an economic perspective. These social networking sites are now becoming the gatekeepers to advertising as more and more people are switching from traditional advertising to online advertisement. These can affect our economy because more and more traditional advertisement companies are going to be losing business due to advertising being done on social networking sites leading to higher unemployment. Advertising through the social network certainly does have its advantages. Facebook alone can advertise to over 500 million users and choose target audiences. Facebook can expand the range of target audiences for a cheaper price than traditional advertising. Another way this can affect our economy is through business venture investments. Business ventures are always looking in investing in the next big thing. Sometimes millions and even billions of dollars are invested into companies that the venture believes to be a good investment. In todays world social networking is the next big thing. The money provided by ventures provides these sites with more services. With these expanding services such as Facebook and MySpace instant messaging features, other online instant messaging services will now have competition and in the future may be no match due to the popularity and simplicity of social networking sites. The perfect example of this is AIM (AOL instant messenger). Around five years ago AIM used to be amongst one of the most popular instant messenger service providers out there. Now it has lost popularity due to the popularity and emergence of social networking. This can affect our economy by lowering the value of other instant messaging sites on the web. All of that was said from a business point of view. Now lets look at it from a consumer point of view. For the hundreds and millions of people who use social networking sites how much does it

cost us? The majority of these sites costs nothing, however it is more common for social dating sites to charge people to upgrade to a premium account. Their strategy is to make the basic service free of browsing for potential soul mates but when it comes time to interact with them you must upgrade to a premium account with the site by paying them a fee. Other various websites also have the same concepts for other services as well. When it comes to other social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and twitter the service is free to all users. However, if your not paying with money your certainly paying in another way, can you guess? Its privacy. When people create these accounts they reveal a lot of information about themselves not only to other individuals but also to companies that are advertising through these sites. For example you may like certain interests and post them on your Facebook profile and a few days later you are the target of a personalized advertisement. You have officially become the companys target group but how? A lot of the times when people sign up for certain applications or games such as Farmville, you allow that application to entirely view your profile exposing all of your information to them. Once that information is obtained they sell your information to third parties. In this tactic your privacy is being exchanged for their business. Sure social networking is free but when it comes down to it the final question you can ask yourself is how much is your privacy really worth to you? And if your privacy is exposed how much will it end up costing you? Overall, people need to be conscious of what they are posting online, who can view it and how it may affect them in the future. They need to be aware of the consequences for posting information on social media websites, and work on getting privacy laws. There are organizations hard at work trying to find ways to make the web and social networks safe. However, it ultimately comes down to common sense. Think before you type or text, you could be saying too much. Especially with the onset of Web 2.0, cloud computing and the mashing of networks and data, the line between you and privacy on the web just got a little more fuzzy.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Linda. James Kempf, Toshio Miki. Wireless Location Privacy: Law and Policy in the U.S., EU and Japan. Internet Society. 2005. <http://www.isoc.org/briefings/015/>. Barnett, Emma. "Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Says Privacy Is No Longer a 'social Norm' Telegraph." Telegraph.co.uk. 11 Jan. 2010. Web. 26 Mar. 2011. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6966628/Facebooks-Mark-Zuckerbergsays-privacy-is-no-longer-a-social-norm.html>. Boscer, Bianca. Facebook to Share Users Home Addresses, Phone Numbers with External Sites. Huffington Post. 28 Feb 2011. Web. 3 Mar 2011. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/ facebook-home-addresses-phone-numbers_n_829459.html?ref=fb&src=sp>. Boyd, Danah M. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Diss. University of California Berkeley. Web. Carlson, Nicholas. "How Does Facebook Make Money?" Business Insider. 18 May 2010. Web. 26 Mar. 2011. <http://www.businessinsider.com/how-does-facebook-make-money-2010-5>. Google. Privacy Policy. Privacy Center. 3 Oct 20. <http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/privacy-policy.html>. "Google Announces First Quarter 2010 Financial Results - Investor Relations - Google." Google Investor Relations. 15 Apr. 2010. Web. 26 Mar. 2011. <http://investor.google.com/earnings/2010/Q1_google_earnings.html>. Harris, Cassandra. Guest Speaker: COM 432. Social Media Specialist, Hawaii Senate. 8 Feb 2011. McKeon, Matt. The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook. 15 May 2010. Web. 9 Mar 2011.

<http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/>. Nickson, Christopher. The History of Social Networking. Digital Trends. 21 Jan 2001. Web. 9 Mar 2011. <http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/ the-history-of-social-networking/>. Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project. 20 Nov 2007. <http://www.w3.org/P3P/>. Sherman, Michelle. The FTCs Proposed Framework for Consumer Privacy Protection. Social Media Law Update Blog. 2011. <http://www.socialmedialawupdate.com/tags/ftc-guidelines-for-privacy/>. Snyder, Wally. "Ethics in Advertising." Reynolds Journalism Institute. 2011. Web. 26 Mar. 2011. <http://www.rjionline.org/projects/ethics-in-advertising/stories/iae/index.php>. Social Insecurity. Consumer Reports. Jun 2010. Web. 7 Mar 2011. <http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2010/june/electronicscomputers/social-insecurity/overview/index.htm>. Social Network. PC Magazine Encyclopedia. 2011. PC Magazine. 9 Mar 2011. <http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/ 0,2542,t=social+network&i=55313,00.asp>. Social Networking Privacy: How to be Safe, Secure and Social. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. 2010. Web. 10 Mar 2011. <http://www.privacyrights.org/social-networking-privacy>. Strickland, Jonathan. "Pros and cons of social networking sites." www.howstuffworks.com. Web. 03 Mar 2011. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/social-networking/information/pros-conssocial-networking.htm>.

Van Rens, Diane. Information Privacy: U.S. Legislation. Media Awareness Network. 2010. <http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/issues/privacy/us_legislation_privacy.cfm?RenderF orPrint=1>. Wikipedia contributors. "Social media." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Mar. 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Cite&page=Social_media&id=42118360 3>.