Social Web privacy: A new kind of social contract we're all signed onto

1993: In a famous New Yorker cartoon, a dog at a computer says to his canine buddy looking up from the floor, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Fast-forward 13 years....

2006: "On the Internet, everybody knows you're a dog," declares the subhead to a Michael Kinsley essay in which he wondered at how narcissistic the social Web was (before it became a cliché). Fast-forward only four years this time....

2010: Although Internet industry CEOs have recently declared the death of privacy (see security expert Bruce Schneier's blog), "privacy is not dead," said social media researcher danah boyd in her keynote at the SXSW conference in Austin last month. "People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline.... Wanting privacy is not about needing something to hide. It’s about wanting to maintain control."

Furthermore, boyd said, privacy and publicity are a mashup. Web meets reality. We all intuitively know there are many gradients between totally private and totally public – some people online know you're a dog, some don't; the numbers vary, based on how you use the Web, who you are, and how you live your life. The Web increasingly mirrors all of "real life." Technology didn't just start interacting with user privacy. Remember "Don't tell anyone who calls that your mom and dad aren't home"? "Will I sound too eager if I pick up after one ring?" Or even: "Who will see me reading this radical book?" Buzz, email, Facebook chat, tweets, texts, etc. are used in the contexts of our real-life relationships and situations just as much. Which is why it's absurd to think privacy is dead, or ever will be.

"Think about a cafe that you like to visit," said boyd. Compare your Facebook page to that public space in real life. "There's a possibility that you’ll intersect with all sorts of different people, but there are some people who you believe you are more likely to interact with than others. You have learned that you're more likely to run into your neighbors and you'd be startled if your mother popped in, since she lives 3,000 miles away. You may have even chosen this particular cafe in the hopes of running into that hottie you have a crush on or avoiding your ex who lives in a different part of town. You have also come to understand that physics means that there's a limit on how many people will be in the cafe. Plus, you'd go completely bonkers if, all of a sudden, everyone from your childhood magically appeared at the cafe simultaneously. One coincidence is destabilizing enough; we can't really handle a collapse in the time-space continuum."

The difference between my old landline and book examples and today's media and communications environment is the speed at which we communicate and socialize and the speed at which new technologies and products become available (the latter are digital, so they can be made available to all users simultaneously and globally within seconds). So we need to think carefully and a lot – in proportion to the speed of technological change, I'd say.

Who needs to think carefully and a lot? Everybody involved, together not in silos – users, companies, educators, policymakers. But let's just consider the two most important stakeholders, which – in the current new user-driven media environment – are really parties to a new, global social contract that's emerging right now, one that I think Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke to in her 21st-Century Statecraft" speech early this year. Those two parties are:

1. Internet industry, users are unprecedentedly your bread and butter. They supply all the "content" on your services. You need to bake consideration of the privacy and safety impacts of their doing so into your product development. For example, when you mash services up together, such as email and social-network updates, you need to think about how one tool is very private and the other very public. People use them differently. So combining people's email address books and social-network friends lists instantly without preparing them can create a lot of cognitive dissonance and bad will. "In digital worlds, people need to be eased into a situation, to understand how to make sense of the setting," boyd said. Companies need to poll their users or at least do focus groups before they make significant changes to the user experience, and after product or feature release, do more consumer education.

Users & providers are "dance partners." "When you moved from Web1.0 to Web2.0," boyd said to "the technologists in the room," "you moved from thinking about designing and deploying software to creating living code. You learned to dance with your users, to evolve with them." That's a powerful metaphor: Social-media companies and users are dance partners like never before. Users are much more than mere customers or consumers, and they may increasingly exercise that inherent power.

2. Users, we don't need to become conspiracy theorists, but we need to be serious about paying attention to our privacy settings – and go over them each time our favorite social tools announce a new social feature (such as Facebook's just-announced new Like button and Instant Personalization). Consumer awareness and self-protection are essential to exercising our power in a user-driven or participatory media environment.

Parents and teachers, kids know they don't want others to have power over them. Help them see that that's what privacy settings are about – having control over their own information and public image. When it's put this way, they know they don't want to let peers, companies, or anyone else do whatever they want with their info, reputations, and digital creations. You can help them see a) that it's reciprocal: their friends feel the same way – privacy and safety are necessarily collaborative in this media environment (see this); and b) that honoring this new reality is protective to all concerned – oneself, one's friends, one's community, and ultimately society. It's all interconnected and interdependent now. Mindful, collaborative behavior is baseline online and cellphone safety as well as privacy (see "Social norming: *So* key to online safety" and "From users to citizens").

Other key points in boyd's talk:

PII and PEI are intermeshed. We hear a lot about personally identifiable information (PII) but not as much about personally embarrassing information (PEI), which is every bit as important to users. Boyd said: "Because most people are interacting online with people they know, they expect to make PII available. They do so because they want to be found by friends. But they also want to keep PEI hidden, at least to those that might go out of their way to use it maliciously. Unfortunately, it's hard to be visible to some and invisible to others." The reality online as well as offline, she said, is that "when people make information available, they make themselves vulnerable." Product developers need to think about that as much as users.

It's complicated, like life. "Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean people want it to be publicized," boyd said. Adults, such as Slate's Kinsley, often conflate the two when they talk about the "solipsistic social Web." They're forgetting to ground social-media use in real life, instead somehow thinking technology is layered on top of life as an add-on. For example, you're "publicly accessible" to others when you're at Starbucks, but you're probably not publicizing your presence, though there are times when you might. You might sometimes use Foursquare so that everybody who follows you on Twitter knows you're there. But the reasons for that aren't necessarily narcissism but maybe rather hoping your local friends notice your shoutout and meet you there or, since Foursquare's a game you play, you may be aiming to become "mayor" of that Starbucks. You're probably not thinking that there's a slim chance a burglar is following you on Twitter and – noting that you're at Starbucks – robs your house, which is why social-media companies need to help educate users about that very slim possibility. Digital media use is about as complicated, changeable, and individual as living.

No magic formula. "Unfortunately, online environments are not nearly as stabilized as offline ones. While the walls in the streets may have ears, digital walls almost always do," boyd said. The environments (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) aren't stable, nor is our use of them. There's little common sense around their use yet, like the old "Don't let anybody know Mom and Dad aren't home" – though most youth privacy features in social network sites (see this). "There's no magical formula ... no easy algorithm to implement. Privacy and publicity are living things.... They are fundamentally processes grounded in needs, desires, and goals, situated in contexts and transformed by technology." Of course some needs and rights haven't changed, such as constitutional and legal ones for Internet users and providers in each country, though laws need to embrace and adjust to new-media conditions.

Because privacy's a living thing that's functioning in a new, rapidly evolving media environment, everyone's a stakeholder in supporting it. We need to 1) stay informed and help our children see the importance of doing so and 2) keep revisiting our privacy settings in light of new conditions. Companies need to keep thinking about the impacts on users of the new conditions, bake that thinking into the products they create, and educate users about new conditions. Policymakers need to understand that 1) users want both privacy and publicity as well as the means to calibrate them and 2) need education as much as tools for intelligent privacy management. And we all need to see that – because of the unstable, collaborative nature of everybody's wellbeing in digital media – privacy and safety are an ongoing negotiation, not a one-size-fits-all, once-and-for-all solution.

So I'd like to hear from you: Do you see it this way too, that a new kind of (multi-party) social contract is now in place, not imposed on us by any single power-holder but by changing conditions in which we are all invested (the social Web, or a user-driven, social/behavioral media environment )? If so, it seems to me that, under this contract, it benefits all parties not only to protect their own interests but to understand those of all other parties and protect them too. Otherwise, misguided "solutions," bad laws and lawsuits, and other signs of dysfunction will continue to distract us from hammering out real solutions together. Sorry to end on such a negative note, but that's what I see. Tell me what you see – via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, in this blog, or in the ConnectSafely forum!

Important related links

"Youth, Privacy & Reputation" by Alice E. Marwick, Diego Murgia, Diaz, John Palfrey, and the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative – a thorough review of research on the subject which has been published in the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU (released 4/12/10)

"How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?" (released 4/14/10), by Chris Jan Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow. Their conclusion: "that young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.... Public policy agendas should therefore not start with the proposition that young adults do not care about privacy and thus do not need regulations and other safeguards. Rather, policy discussions should acknowledge that the current business environment along with other factors sometimes encourages young adults to release personal data in order to enjoy social inclusion even while in their most rational moments they may espouse more conservative norms."

Security expert Bruce Schneier blogging about both of the above 2 surveys

Consumer privacy experts: the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Future of Privacy Forum

"Young Adults Do Care About Online Privacy" in the Washington Post

"Keeping Personal Info Private," one of 8 lessons from Cablevision's "Power to Learn" project for grades 4-8 (thanks to educator Anne Bubnic for pointing this out)

Major buzz about Buzz, but not about its safety

Google's Buzz, which it unveiled today, means to make Gmail much more social – adding updates and photo- and video-sharing; turning emailers into Twitter-like "followers"; and making all of that local to you (and you to it) via your cellphone, according to hundreds of news articles including PCWorld's. That last bit concerning geolocation raises some safety concerns, writes ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in CNET, where he posted an audio interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Writing also in the Huffington Post, he says "Mobile Buzz, which will work initially on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones," taking advantage of their GPS tech "so that users will not only be able to update their status but their location as well." Of course Buzz will work with Google maps. Will that social pinpointing capability be something people have to consciously turn on? I hope so, because young people don't always stop for safety or privacy reality checks in the rapid-fire back-'n'-forth of teen texting and socializing. But how much will that help even so? These products like Buzz are all just social convenience tools to teens. Teens don't think as much as we do about separate stand-alone products, services, or devices, each with its own privacy policy, set of terms of service. It's all much more of a means to the much more important end of staying connected and maintaining mindshare with peers. That's a challenge when companies just want to throw these various tasks at the lawyers and be done with it. The good news is, Google's integrating all of its Buzz-related products for fixed and mobile use; maybe they'll have integrated safety and privacy too.

Facebook's orders of magnitude of change

In six years Facebook has gone from being a social utility for students of a single northeastern US elite university (a sort of directory+community where Harvard students could find and socialize with each other) to a social utility for nearly 400 million people of multiple ages, languages, and walks of life worldwide (FB passed its sixth birthday last Thursday).

My theory is, that fairly spare original design as a utility made it less flexible for individual users but more flexible for users as a whole – in other words for the changes that going from mere hundreds to hundreds of millions would entail. A pretty bare-bones social utility (like Twitter, too, as opposed to MySpace, which was always more of a self-expression tool than a social utility) is simply a person's social network visualized. [If this makes no sense, pls let me know or post your own theory in comments below.] "In its latest redesign, Facebook is playing up applications, games and search," USATODAY reports. That makes sense to me, because apps and games are one way users can customize their FB experience, and search becomes paramount simply because of the challenge of finding someone among 400 million users – but also grows the tension between those concerned about privacy and those who want to be found by old friends and long-lost relatives. For those concerned about privacy, by the way, here's a very handy how-to article: "The Three Facebook [privacy] Settings Every User Should Check Now": the ones concerning who can see what you share (updates, photos, etc.), who can see your personal info, and who can search for and find your FB profile with Web search engines.

Facebook's about-face on terms of use

Facebook was smart to go back to its previous terms of use while it conducts this terms-of-use-updating experiment in a spotlighted Petrie dish in what seems like the middle of Mumbai's Victoria Station at rush hour (see CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "Update on Terms"). And this is indeed a giant (global) societal experiment, as we the people (the content producers and distributors) and they the companies (the content co-distributors and hosts) - not to mention policymakers and other overseers and observers - figure out who is responsible and to what degree for protecting the content producer, aka user. Because the social Web is largely a user-produced and user-controlled medium, clearly (to me, anyway) the responsibility is shared. Educating users about that is a challenge all by itself, witness the general lack of close attention to privacy options (see "10 privacy settings every Facebook user should know"), but factor in developing teenage brains learning impulse control and shared responsibility at the same time, and the user-protection challenge grows significantly (see PBS Frontline's "The Teenage Brain").

I said Facebook's smart in my lead up there because, in going back to its previous terms-of-use version, it's buying time for the process of folding user input into the new terms' development process and this giant experiment is also about user (and societal) education. It needs time. There are factors involved that only a few of the privacy bloggers are writing about (e.g., author Daniel Solove), including the tension between consumer privacy pressures and those from law enforcement to hand over as well as retain user data after users have closed their accounts. But time is short, too. Though this social and media experiment - and consensus-building in general - take time, Facebook doesn't have a whole lot, given the climate outside the Petrie dish. The predator panic recently brought into perspective by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force is a good illustration of how worst-case scenarios and fears tend to eclipse the public discussion about the social Web - to the detriment of child safety (see the New York Times and my post on that). Why to the detriment? Because kids usually want to get far away from scared, worked-up parents; they go "underground" online, where parents aren't in the mix. Never the best scenario. [Thanks to UK privacy researcher Tara Taubman for pointing out a few of the links below.]

Here are other reports and commentaries worth reading:

Audio interview with both Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly by CNET/CBS tech analyst Larry Magid (Larry is also my co-director at ConnectSafely.org)

A lawyer's view on Facebook's 180 and how enforceable terms of use are anyway (Maxwell S. Kennerly in Philadelphia)

University of Wisconsin information studies Prof. Michael Zimmer's very critical view of Facebook's process

Internet consultant and blogger David Silversmith on the technical and monetary realities and then "plain old reality"

The Guardian on how people definitely do read the "fine print" in social sites (vs. grocery store loyalty cards)

Coverage at the Washington Post and New York Times.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force report

Congess eyeing online privacy

Seasoned bloggers, social networkers, and mobile-phone Twitterers pretty much know their lives are very public, but they're also concerned about their privacy, the New York Times points out. "Those same questions of data collection and privacy policies are attracting the attention of Congress, too," the Times reports, so lawmakers are doing some information-gathering: "On Aug. 1, four top members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters ordering 33 cable and Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Comcast and Cox Communications, to provide details about their privacy standards. That followed House and Senate hearings last month about privacy and behavioral targeting, in which advertisers show ads to consumers based on their travels around the Web. One apparent result, the Wall Street Journal reports, is that "Yahoo Inc. said it will allow users to stop receiving targeted ads based on factors like what Web pages they visit or other ads they click on." The Journal added that "Google, Microsoft and a number of Yahoo's competitors already allow customers to opt out" of such ads.

Social networkers want more options

The PC World headline calls it "next-generation social networking." Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology are saying exactly what UK teens told Prof. Sonia Livingstone in her study (see "Fictionalizing their profiles"): that social sites need more ways to characterize friends and more options for what anybody can see in a profile. They need to reflect socializing in the "real world" more. "Many social-networking sites essentially force users to become part of a huge community, or they force users to choose whether someone else is a friend or not, with no other subtleties defining that relationship," Liz Lawley, director of RIT's social-computing lab, told a Microsoft-sponsored conference of researchers, PC World reports. Thinking and operating in binaries - friend or non-friend, private or public - instead of in the more subtle gradations of human relationships and intimacy just doesn't work, avid online socializers find. It'll be interesting to see how soon social-networking sites do something about this.

Fictionalizing their profiles

Adults need to take what they see in teen social-networking profiles with a grain of salt. Case in point:

Six UK newspapers ran a story about a teenager's "wild party" that her mother said never happened. It was a bit of fiction lifted from the girl's Bebo profile. First there was an invite sent out promising "the party of the year" for her 16th birthday, CNET reports. "Subsequent posts on Jodie Hudson's Bebo account spoke of underage drinking, sex acts, and violence that occurred at the celebration." The papers said 400 teens showed up and, encountering the ensuing "chaos," Jodie's mother "punched her in the face out of anger." Amanda Hudson wrote the newspapers that there was no underage drinking, no sex, no violence, and no stealing, despite what her daughter posted in Bebo. She's "suing for defamation and breach of privacy." In its coverage, The Independent cited legal experts as saying "the case may be a legal landmark because there is no precedent in disputes involving third parties who use or publish information from social-networking sites."

The case is also a perfectly timed illustration of a point London School of Economics Prof. Sonia Livingstone makes in her latest study, "Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social-networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression" in New Media & Society (June 208).

"It should not be assumed that profiles are simply read as information about an individual," the social psychology professor suggests. Referring to one of her research subjects, Livingstone writes: "Jenny, like others, is well aware that people’s profiles can be 'just a front.' For several of the participants, it seemed that position in the peer network was more significant than the personal information provided, rendering the profile a place-marker more than a self portrait."

Some teens have several profiles on various social sites, some with the peer group more on display than the profile owner. All in all, though, the profiles of the social networkers in her study apparently were more about the individual in relation to his or her group of friends than about the group itself. That blend of individual and group is key and what seems to drive the information that appears in the profile (photos, invites, comments, favorite whatevers). So great care goes into what is made private (to friends only) and what is made public, and - Livingstone indicates later in her analysis - the sites' severely limited choices where privacy's concerned (public or private) is a problem for young people wanting to display more gradations. "Teenagers must and do disclose personal information in order to sustain intimacy [as in sharing innermost thoughts or passwords]," Livingstone writes, but they wish to be in control of how they manage this disclosure."

One final observation I found fascinating, in response to what many adults are thinking these days (and which I'm adding here because the article costs $15 to download): Livingstone writes that "although it indeed appears that, for many young people, social networking is 'all about me, me, me,' this need not imply narcissistic self-absorption. Rather, following Mead’s (1934) fundamental distinction between the 'I' and the 'me' as twin aspects of the self, social networking is about 'me' in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to and represented by others, rather than the private 'I' known best by oneself."

My takeaway: There's no reason to overreact to a superficial surf through a bunch of social-networking profiles - even those of our own kids' peers. In many ways their profile fabrications are good. They're...

Protective - only real-life friends, not creeps, know what is and isn't true, which means strangers who try to contact them have zero credibility and usually get ignored.

A safe way to explore identity and social relating, which is part of adolescent development

A creative outlet with instant audience (mostly their friends and creative collaborators), something aspiring writers of the past could only dream about - see the last sentence of this item on the California-based Digital Youth research project.

Readers: Dr. Livingstone told me she'll send a pdf copy of her article to anyone interested. If you are, drop me an email at anne@netfamilynews.org, and I'll pass your request along to her.

Related links

Skewing a little younger: Note how 10-year-old Clementine creates and plays with fictional identities in various sites and worlds online, as told by her mother, New York Times columnist Michelle Slatalla in "Today, I think I'll be Hippohead" ("as of last month, more than 100 new virtual worlds had started up or were in development," Michelle reports).

The social sites teens use: In the UK, "Facebook dominates UK social networking with 45.29% of the market, almost double the share of second-placed Bebo and three times more than MySpace, as micro blogging site Twitter shows major growth," UK-based BrandRepublic.com reports.

"Just because they crave attention?"

Some US police don't take SN profiles at face value - see this on how some "gang members" in MySpace are just wannabes acting out.

Supreme Court justice's P2P security breach

No, Justice Breyer wasn't using a file-sharing network himself. But a guy at his investment firm was on LimeWire and inadvertently shared "the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 2,000 of the firm's clients, including a number of high-powered lawyers and Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer," the Washington Post reports. This isn't just about file-sharing in the workplace. It's about how private family records and information can be made public on P2P networks if file-sharers and music fans at home aren't configuring the software correctly. It's only one key topic for family discussion about file-sharing, others being the ethics of file-sharing and the potential for parents being sued by the RIAA for pirated music shared on family computers (at least go into the software with your kid and see how Preferences, Options, or Sharing is set up).

Child info floating around the Net

The Los Angeles Times article features a very anxious mom whose story illustrates a data security issue much broader than lost or stolen laptops with databases of people's personal info on their hard drives. It's about what's happening as "vast databases of sensitive information are bought and sold by private companies" focused a lot more on monetizing millions of registered users than on protecting the users' privacy. "Reunion.com's privacy policy says the site "prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13'," the Times reports. "But that doesn't address the site's own data-gathering." The company told the Times it had bought the records of 260 million people from a data broker that it said was told not to include minors in the purchased data. Still, the name of the mom's 4-year-old child showed up on a page she stumbled on in Reunion.com. "She was especially distressed that the listing for her husband's name included the family's town, Beaverton - not the sort of information she wanted anywhere near her son's identity." And now it's in the L.A. Times too.

Just because they crave attention?

Why do teens post such personal information online for all the world to see? The burning question of the first decade of the 21st century, perhaps - at least for parents and other digital non-natives. I'm late in pointing you to this, but "Exposed," a recent cover story of the New York Times Magazine looks at "oversharing" in the full, seemingly unedited story of Emily (Gould) the 20-something compulsive blogger. Her story suggests that the answer may partly be the reality TV phenomenon ("that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges," aka random readers); genetics ("some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others ... technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale"); a twisted concept of free speech acted out ("I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted"); and crying out for attention. I agreed with her when she wrote: "I don't think people write online exclusively because they crave attention."

In any case, overexposure phenomenon is probably not going away - partly because diaries and journals will never go away and partly because the audience (or the imagined audience) certainly won't. As Emily told a Times reader in a Q&A the paper later published, "It's probably a pretty safe bet that people will continue to make mistakes online - after all, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so besides themselves. This is the best and worst thing about the blogosphere," she continues, referring to its readers. "Other people's mistakes, which is to say, their impulsively revealed thoughts and opinions, can be fascinating."

Though there is pressure on young people to express themselves digitally, this doesn't mean oversharing is what social networking is all about and it doesn't mean all children will. The way teens express themselves online is highly individual. It also might help parents to know that privacy is no more black & white where personal blogging's concerned than is life itself. Emily refers to an important book that points this out: "I'm reading an interesting book right now about reputation and the Internet by Daniel Solove, and in it he posits that we've traditionally thought of privacy as a binary: private vs. public. He thinks that we should begin to think of degrees of semi-privacy, in terms of both self-regulation and legal regulation." And teens reportedly are already thinking in terms of degrees of privacy as well as of fact and fiction. For them, the latter isn't binary either: they add degrees of privacy by fictionalizing parts of what they present of themselves (see "Online aliases" and "Social networkers: Thinking about privacy").

But back to Emily's reference to "self-regulation." Isn't that where parenting comes in? Teaching (and hopefully modeling) self-regulation, as our rules for them are replaced by the trust they earn? It's not so much about shutting the blog or a compulsion down, maybe, as it is about providing perspective on privacy and self-respect. What has much more lasting value to them is helping them think about how broad their audience may actually (or ultimately) be, what image they're presenting of themselves now and when people encounter their content in the future, and how little control they have over what can happen to comments once online.

Related links

Author and professor Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation

"The social Web's digital divide"

"Say Everything" in New York magazine

"The 'naked generation?'"

"Growing up in public"

"Nude photo-sharing: Q from a family that's been there"

"Generation Y has its own ideas of what privacy is" in the Naperville [Ill.] Sun

Finding bog snorkelers in MySpace

Well, this isn't just about finding bog snorkelers (for the great unwashed, I'll get to what it is in a moment). It's about how easily journalists and other users of search engines (maybe parents too) can find people in any social-networking site. The article in Journalism.co.uk shows how easily reporters can search social sites for case studies and background info and how easily that can turn up the most specific details about people's lives. Within 10 minutes the writer -who'd set out to "find private information" about someone under 16, including where s/he could be found - "was able to find the mobile number of a 15-year-old girl in South London, the address where a 17-year-old waitress is employed in Kent," etc. The article shows how to do advance searches, for example for "pro-ana" sites (supporting anorexia) or bog snorkelers, preferably in a general search engine such as Google, not in the social site itself: "If you are doing research on the fury caused by pro-anorexia sites on the web then you will find only a handful of 'pro-ana' ... references using Bebo's search tool. But more than 170 Bebo pages can be found in Google using this search string: site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo 'pro-ana'." For "bog snorkeling," 120 results in MySpace were turned up with this string: site:myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction "bog snorkelling". As for what bog snorkeling is, it's a competitive sport - sometimes combined with running and mountain biking in a new kind of triathlon - see this page in Wikipedia for more.

Online aliases: The new privacy

Young people are increasingly finding the need to put up firewalls between private and public online lives. They're "assuming online aliases" on social-networking sites "to avoid the prying eyes of parents, college recruiters, potential employers, and other overly interested strangers," the Washington Post reports. "They are also being more selective in who they allow in as 'friends' by paring back the size of their social circles" or friend lists. As well, they're increasingly fictionalizing parts of their profile and blog personas so associations with their real-life identities aren't as quickly or easily made. All this is good. It's a sign that teens have various means of self-protection online - not just social sites' privacy features. It's also a sign young people are employing critical thinking at a time when it has never been needed more. Critical thinking is the sort of "filter" that can only improve, and it goes with them everywhere, offline as well as online!

Young teachers: *Not* thinking about privacy

In that last item I linked to a National Public Radio report about how more thought is going into online privacy on the part of teen and 20-something social networkers (see just below). The story didn't say they were being more private but that they were considering their options a lot more (though 66% of teen social networkers do use privacy controls, Pew/Internet has found - see this). Well, this story in the Washington Post detailing some of the more raunchy content on some young school teachers' social-networking profiles conflicts with NPR's. What surprised me most was just how unthinking the Post's 22-something sources were about how public their intimate photos and sarcastic comments were. It's kind of today's version of "not reading the directions" - so many thought only their friends could see a profile that was actually open to and searchable by "the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network." What they also need to know comes from a lawyer with National Teachers Association (teachers' union). The Post cites him as saying that "if teachers claim free speech protection under the First Amendment ... the US Supreme Court recently ruled that governments can fire employees if their speech harmed the workplace's mission and function."

Teen social networkers: Thinking about privacy

For a good reality check on teens' privacy online and how they handle it, don't miss this report by National Public Radio's Laura Sydell. Parents may not be comfortable with what kids put online, but at least they can take comfort that most teens who use social sites take advantage of privacy controls and the young people Sydell spoke with are really thinking about the issue, not just blithely putting stuff out there. As they should be, and this is why parents need to continue encourage their kids to think critically in this way: Privacy conditions are constantly changing on them, with that gray area between ethical and unethical use of their information growing (see ArsTechnica). An example from Slashdot: "Because Facebook allows users to 'tag' photos with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute photos that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends."

Teen social networkers: Thinking about privacy

For a good reality check on teens' privacy online and how they handle it, don't miss this report by National Public Radio's Laura Sydell. Parents may not be comfortable with what kids put online, but at least they can take comfort that most teens who use social sites take advantage of privacy controls and the young people Sydell spoke with are really thinking about the issue, not just blithely putting stuff out there. As they should be, and this is why parents need to continue encourage their kids to think critically in this way: Privacy conditions are constantly changing on them, with that gray area between ethical and unethical use of their information growing (see ArsTechnica). An example from Slashdot: "Because Facebook allows users to 'tag' photos with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute photos that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends."

On monitoring online kids

Some parents continue to wonder how privacy they should allow their children, where online activity is concerned. Of course, there is no simple answer even in a single household. Even in a family we may have rules and values that apply to all, but in so many cases different ages require different rules, and each child is individual where rule compliance, maturity, and trust levels are concerned. Having said all that, though, I will add that no parent should hesitate to use monitoring software if s/he's concerned about a child's safety. If you feel your child's communicating a little obsessively online with someone you don't know and the child's otherwise acting a little strange (for example, spending too much time online or being secretive about his or her online "friends"), her privacy is simply not an issue; you're keeping her safe. But a commentator in the New York Times suggests there are other reasons to use monitoring software that make it perfectly justifiable, and he makes a compelling argument, but - again - I think it depends on the child. "Will your teenagers find other ways of communicating to their friends when they realize you may be watching? Yes. But text messages and cellphones don’t offer the anonymity and danger of the Internet. They are usually one-on-one with someone you know. It is far easier for a predator to troll chat rooms and MySpace and Facebook." I agree about the trolling that happens on the Web, but he's missing the fact that 1) young people can share phone numbers via chat, IM, and social-networking sites which can be used later to call them on their cellphones (see "Grooming by phone too"), and 2) 90% of child sexual-exploitation victims know the offender (see "Sex offenders on MySpace: Some context"). But, speaking of MySpace and Facebook, this other perspective on teen social networking might be helpful too: "Dispelling 2 social Web myths."

2008: Whose info is whose?

One of the things we'll all need to sort out on the social Web is what content belongs to who. Is your profile your content or that of the service hosting it? Are your friends' comments in your profile your content, theirs, or the host's? Sound complicated? It is. But it needs to be worked out in order to meet another need people are voicing: "data portability" or social-networking interoperability. "There is a crying need for some open and standardized format to allow social Web users to manage and move their data around," reports a San Jose Mercury News blog. "The data that your 'friends enter about themselves? Well, they've shared it with you, but is it yours to export? And since you've entered into an agreement with Facebook to voluntarily add information to Facebook's database, does the company have some kind of claim as well, (not to mention some obligation to prevent one of your "friends" from exporting your contact information without letting you know)?" These are not just copyright or content-ownership questions, they're privacy ones. Great fuel for family discussions on how information we post can not only get away from us but also may no longer be "our" info.

UK data security breach & kids

A massive security breach involving the personal information of "virtually every child in Britain" has occurred in the United Kingdom, The Guardian reports. It "could expose the personal data of more than 25 million people - nearly half the country's population," CBS News reports. The data concerns "families with children, including names, dates of birth, addresses, bank account information and insurance records." Two computer disks containing the data were sent via ordinary mail between two government departments and were apparently lost in the mail. The breach was announced to the House of Commons yesterday by Alistair Darling, Britain's equivalent to our treasury secretary. He said this wasn't the first time Britain's tax agency had experienced such a breach. There was, however, no evidence that the data has fallen into criminal hands. This is a clear illustration of risky it would be to have a national database of children's personal information in the US, which is what would be required in order to establish children's age verification online (for more on this, see "Social networker age verification revisited").

Social networking: What cops know

Indiana State Police Lt. Charles Cohen's 16-year-old nephew "has seven MySpace pages, including one in which he and his buddies pretend to be Chuck Norris," the Associated Press reports. That's a great observation for parents to hear, echoed by many experts on Web 2.0 - that there are all kinds of blogs and social-networking profiles, from pure fiction to "reality TV" on the Web to hybrids of the two (the majority probably being in that in-between gray area). The content of Lieutenant Cohen's talks to fellow law enforcement say something about how police work is changing, about social networkers' use of privacy tools, and about how the Web increasingly mirrors offline life (here's the main article. "Many police departments have computer crews that perform skillful forensic analysis on hard drives and specialize in nailing online predators." Cohen's talks are for everybody else - "beat cops, homicide detectives and other investigators" who are either in denial about needing to understand the Net or don't realize what a tool it can be.

'Protecting Social Networkers' Privacy 101'

If people at your house are concerned about their or others' privacy in social-networking sites, there's help at GetNetWise.org now. The nonprofit, Washington-based site (for full disclosure I'm a big fan and on GNW's Advisory Board) has simple, step-by-step video tutorials on how to turn on privacy features in three of the most popular social sites: Facebook, MySpace, and Xanga.

Now, you may be one of those Net-literate people who knows there are thousands of social-networking sites and sites on phones and the Web with profiles, media-sharing, and other social-networking features. This fact in no way diminishes the value of these tutorials because…

1. The three sites they're about together have well over 200 million profiles on them, and
2. Though each site has a unique set-up, the tutorials show (parents, mostly) that privacy protection is not rocket science.

They illustrate how easy it is to use privacy tools in social sites, which promotes parent-child discussion and may help get kids over a big hurdle we've noticed in the ConnectSafely.org forum which social networkers have trouble clearing: checking out the tools and protections their favorites sites provide them. It's that age-old aversion we all have to reading instructions, but it keeps getting more important.

So, armed with the clear audio-visual info in these tutorials, parents can go through the privacy features with young social networkers and have informed conversations with older ones about how they're protecting their privacy - from restricting access to their profiles and photos to deciding if search engines can list them to blocking comments and other communications from people who aren't their friends. There are more options in these sites than GetNetWise could possibly cover in a 2-3-minute video, so hopefully these little tutorials will make it easier for people to take a look at all the ways they can manage their privacy and reputations on the social Web.

Related links

"Online spin control"

"Protecting teen reputations on Web 2.0"

Our book, MySpace Unraveled, attempts to do something quite similar: demystify teens' social-networking experiences for parents with some background and an illustrated guide to how it works. Our reasoning: When parents understand how things work, we're less likely to overreact and send kids into "stealth mode," which can put them at greater risk than if they're using responsible Web sites we know about at home, where we (parents) still have some influence.