Friday, 27 February 2009
AND ANOTHER THING...
Read this from Time magazine for a humorous take on why Facebook isn't just for the teenagers...
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
ALAS, POOR FACEBOOK...
A typical teenage Internet user. Or a monster. Almost the same thing....I knew it well. Or at least I thought I did. I have learnt in the last few weeks that Facebook is a lot nastier than the innocent little social networking site that it shows itself as. I thought I knew you, Facebook! (sob, sob, cue cheesy violin music.) But seriously, this has shown me just how contradictory, intrusive and insidious Facebook can be. I have told you mostly the good so far; now some other stuff which is mostly bad and ugly.
Last week we established that it is perilously easy to hack an account through an application. A bit more on these applications. These are essentially things that provide a service, such as games. However, applications such as quizzes and "top friends" require access to your account information. This, if you are not quite careful, then gives them access to your friends' account information as well. Such applications do come up with a warning at the start, but most people will tell you not to be so boring if you actually pay attention to such things. Not only this, but some are horribly intrusive. Things like asking the question "Do You Like So-and-So?" as part of an application and then telling them essentially whether or not you like them through a notification is, in my opinion, awful. How are you supposed to respond when you are effectively told "I don't like you" across the internet by someone you thought was your friend? Oh wait, that's right! There are hardly any real friends on Facebook. Sorry, I am a little angry, but my point stands.
Very few people bother to adjust their default privacy settings, not realising how dangerous this can be. Letting the whole world and his dog see practically everything about you, especially intimate things only meant to be seen by your friends, is sheer madness. Here is a link to a decent set of guidelines by Nick O'Neill, a Facebook expert, and another one from the security company Sophos. Reading through these two and putting them into practice, it seems as if they are pretty much diametrically opposed to the use of my peers. I have done the recommended things and I am not allowed by my parents to put photos of me on Facebook. By doing these things I have pretty much been rendered a Facebook vegetable. Any Facebook user will tell you that Facebook is all about putting photos up and laughing with people at them. Unfortunately future employers and university registrars disagree. However, what annoys me the most is that Facebook gives its own recommendations for privacy and a safety policy, and then condones the use of applications such as "So-and-So is having Sex! Click here for more or try it for yourself!" That really irritates me.
Last week we established that it is perilously easy to hack an account through an application. A bit more on these applications. These are essentially things that provide a service, such as games. However, applications such as quizzes and "top friends" require access to your account information. This, if you are not quite careful, then gives them access to your friends' account information as well. Such applications do come up with a warning at the start, but most people will tell you not to be so boring if you actually pay attention to such things. Not only this, but some are horribly intrusive. Things like asking the question "Do You Like So-and-So?" as part of an application and then telling them essentially whether or not you like them through a notification is, in my opinion, awful. How are you supposed to respond when you are effectively told "I don't like you" across the internet by someone you thought was your friend? Oh wait, that's right! There are hardly any real friends on Facebook. Sorry, I am a little angry, but my point stands.
Very few people bother to adjust their default privacy settings, not realising how dangerous this can be. Letting the whole world and his dog see practically everything about you, especially intimate things only meant to be seen by your friends, is sheer madness. Here is a link to a decent set of guidelines by Nick O'Neill, a Facebook expert, and another one from the security company Sophos. Reading through these two and putting them into practice, it seems as if they are pretty much diametrically opposed to the use of my peers. I have done the recommended things and I am not allowed by my parents to put photos of me on Facebook. By doing these things I have pretty much been rendered a Facebook vegetable. Any Facebook user will tell you that Facebook is all about putting photos up and laughing with people at them. Unfortunately future employers and university registrars disagree. However, what annoys me the most is that Facebook gives its own recommendations for privacy and a safety policy, and then condones the use of applications such as "So-and-So is having Sex! Click here for more or try it for yourself!" That really irritates me.
Facebook and the like are a parallel society. A society where the governors reserve the right to take over your affairs after you die. A society where things that are inappropriate for good reasons in the real world do not turn a head. A society where an image of mob rule is projected and officials do whatever they please, regardless of hypocrisy. A society where sick comments and jokes are suddenly transmogrified into desperately funny comments and jokes just because they are on the internet. But it isn't all bad. It can bring people back together and can be a great way to network with friends. Facebook is a service, not a tool, which means that it is not simply a means to an end, it is also a body that is "intelligent" in its own right.
I also worry about identity online. If I am "tagged" in a silly photo and it is seen out of context, then it might be taken the wrong way. What does that say about me to a stranger? There was a controversy over the online photo-sharing service Flickr when two girls posted a photo of them in Australia and this was used by Virgin in an advertising campaign without the permission of the girls who were in it. While I am all for technology, I don't like the way that it makes it easier to take advantage of you.
This has made me think about why I got Facebook in the first place - to be in the loop. Essentially I was just going with the grain, following the crowd. The trouble is that when absolutely everyone follows a trend it is nigh on impossible to do anything except do the same for fear of complete ostracism. Maybe I am being vain and like many others wildly overestimate people's desire to be near me and even then, half the people I am "friends" with now will not want anything to do with me in twenty years' time, and friend lists are well-meaning but seem a little difficult to manage - every time I try to set one up whatever internet provider I am using doesn't respond. Deeply unhelpful. However, that lady Danah Boyd has again some sensible stuff to say on the subject which you can read here. Basically as long as we have a fairly reasonable self-contained identity online we can make sure that we don't end up looking rather foolish. Here is her blog, which is supposedly very good, and here is Sam Jackson's site, a student who she mentions. It is all good stuff, so read it if you have the time. Maybe Facebook isn't so bad after all, but I am still very frightened by it. I suppose I have a choice: either roll with everything Facebook can throw at me or delete it and ignore it completely. The overall message is, although I have got angry this time round, is that it isn't necessarily the right thing to do if you scream and run from all social sites, even though they are pretty scary. Just have a care. Make like a paranoid android and DON'T PANIC!
Here are a couple more videos, funny but true (especially the last one):
Monday, 9 February 2009
DO THE SMS GENERATION DREAM OF SHEEPS' FACEBOOK PROFILES?
As you may or may not have realised, I have shamelessly pilfered the title of the short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" for the subject of this blog post - social networking. What is the point of Facebook? How do we use it? Why has it caused controversy? Where did it all come from? Ah, but in hyperspace "there are no truths, only questions" (Danah Boyd - we'll hear more about her later).
Facebook began as a site where Harvard students could create a profile and talk to others, but even from the beginning it was shrouded in controversy. Mark Zuckerberg, the supposed founder of Facebook, has been accused of stealing the idea from classmates who hired Zuckerberg as a programmer for a remarkably similar social site. The case remains unsolved - read more here.
Facebook has made other people angry too. The initial Zuckerberg scheme was to put pictures of two people up next to each other and get people to vote on who was more attractive (The Facebook), but this was shut down by the Harvard administrators soon after. Offices have banned Facebook because of the number of workers messing about on Facebook instead of working. The biggest controversy came in 2006 when Zuckerberg introduced the "News Feed", which is the home page on Facebook. It details everything all your friends have done in the last little while - status updates, comments, wall posts, everything. This caused a furore as students in particular started to berate Zuckerberg for the invasion of privacy. What these students seem to forget is that they put the stuff on the internet and Facebook can change their policies at any time without undue warning and as users we must be aware of the potential for people to see everything we put on the web and more. As normal, the mass of teenagers checking notifications and just generally interested in technology has seemed to make some people think that Facebook represents everything that is wrong with this country and all Facebook users are feckless twits. Now why would anyone think that? Let's see why and how people use Facebook.
Facebook is a social network online. A social network is just a way of linking people together - I know a guy who knows a guy who know a guy who I could buy a car off. We use Facebook to get in touch and we arrange prices, collection et al. That's one way of using Facebook - making drawn-out processes shorter. However, a great number of people use Facebook to make contact with friends or family. My cousins at university keep in touch with their parents through Facebook, and I arrange things with my friends on Facebook (yes, you did read that correctly, I do in fact have friends). Friends on Facebook are an interesting thing. Do you consider all your "friends" on Facebook to be your friends in real life? It seems to me that "friends" means, where Facebook is concerned, those people whom you talk to most regularly. Calling these people "friends" could be viewed by cynics as a way to make it seem like those who we don't care enough about to actually want to talk to face-to-face are closer to us than they actually are. Danah Boyd has a detailed article on how we use Facebook here.
Mark ZuckerbergI am all for social networks, but I worry about who my message goes out to. My privacy settings list me as not searchable on Google and only friends can see my profile, but I think that what goes on the internet stays on the internet, and that could potentially be very damaging. You can't actually delete your Facebook account with any great ease, only "deactivate" it, which is a fairly intrusive situation. Why can you put everything on the internet and then not take it off? A situation that highlighted this problem occurred with a software writer - read more here. The BBC have also identified that some seemingly harmless applications could harvest account and identity information, which could be a terrible problem. I worry that future employees can find me on Facebook and that what is supposed to be an outlet for me outside of school ends up reading like a CV, which is a worrying situation. Do I toe the line and miss part of Facebook's objective, or do I go wild and potentially get grilled by universities and potential employees (read what The Times had to say here)?
So that's what's what. Things worth thinking about: am I using Facebook how I want to, how I am supposed to, both? What problems do I face from the material I put on Facebook? Is what I put on Facebook a true reflection of who or what I really am? All this and more up for discussion before next week, when there's more Facebook and a look at the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. Here, of course, are your videos:
Monday, 2 February 2009
WHO AM I?
Q. What do I, a Michigan musician and an American elementary school have in common?
A. We are all William Yates!
I found out all this information simply through a Google search. I went in expecting to find at least something other than information about me, but I ended up with about six and a half million hits. That's a little scary. I, like any other person, want to know that I am an individual with an identity. But where does my online identity stop and my offline identity begin?
Here are some fairly uninteresting things about me: I go to St Paul's School, I have blond hair, I cycle to school most mornings. However, this is only part of my offline identity. If you really wanted to you could, with the internet, find out my discipline record throughout school, my political views, my full date of birth, my parents' salaries, my teachers' Facebook passwords and goodness only knows what else. The amount of personal information available through the web is terrifying.
It isn't only the internet. There are devices we use every day that record information about our spending habits, our whereabouts, who we contact. For example: some time ago my dad had to be airlifted off a ski slope because of an injury at considerable personal expense. Within about 36 hours his bank had phoned him to ask what had cost so much. The Problem is that with so much financial information on the internet, it is becoming more common to see people trying to steal your identity and use bank details and the like to their advantage - identity theft. Your Oyster card keeps track of where you are - if that information fell into the wrong hands, think of the trouble it could cause. The Metropolitan Police requested information about specific Oyster card whereabouts 436 times between August 2004 and March 2006. Phone companies are constantly keeping tabs on you so that they can unlock phones and help us out of trouble, but this could pose a significant threat to our privacy if they fell into the wrong hands. Is Big Brother watching us? Is it bad or good that we have all this information floating about in cyberspace?
Thankfully, there are lots of things that can help us stay safe on the web. Things like Roboform, a program for PCs, allows you to store all your passwords and details and access them via one "master-phrase" so that you don't juggle passwords, hackers don't get near your data and filling out forms online can be done quicker. To me this is a brilliant idea: it is doubtful (but not impossible) that we will ever find an answer to computer security that doesn't involve some recollection on our part, but Roboform offers to do that for us. Similar products include 1Password for Mac and Password Safe for all computers. The problems come when people misunderstand or just ignore safety policies. Did you know that Facebook can change its privacy policy at any point and we wouldn't necessarily be notified? Safety with web identity depends on us following the rules.
Another safety feature that techies swear by is encrypted data. This is when instead of passwords, which can be cracked quite easily by humans, computers invent a code that makes all your information into gibberish for all those who don't know the code or cipher. The cipher can be translated by a special key, which tells you what the actual information says. These keys can have various bit values - the higher the bit value, the more possible combinations there are. For example, a 56-bit key allows more than 70 quadrillion (70 000 000 000 000 000) combinations. That, I'm sure you'll agree, is quite impressive for a key the fraction of the size of a blank word document. Read more about it here. Encryption is used in computers for all sorts of things, among them protecting personal data and therefore your identity from people, which is rather reassuring.
Another interesting advance in the field of technological identity has come in the shape of the Google Profile (here is the unofficial Google blog explanation). Google is becoming a social network with things like intelligent address books where your contacts are "friends" and calling emails "conversations". To this avail it has a new feature that lets those who you allow to view it access all the social networks you want your friends to see. Cool. A network that lets you access blogs, Facebook and Twitter, all in one place. It looks like it will be big - really big. It also shares all your contact details, though, and when you can be searched on the web that might not be so good. But never fear, Google lets you choose who sees the important stuff. Read more here.
So. Places you can have profiles or an identity: Facebook, blogs, microblogs, instant messenger, the list goes on. Even your email is likely to disclose some information about you: my email is the name of where some of my cousins live. Some people like to use their names. Interesting (if slightly odd) psychological questions: does our email address show who we really are? If not that, what does? Is our Facebook or our blog who we are online and offline, one, the other, both? Are we safe in the knowledge that our data is safe under password or encryption? I suppose that we will only know what's safe when we are let down by it.
Here are some worthwhile videos.
Another video, this time about how we identify ourselves to websites.
A. We are all William Yates!
I found out all this information simply through a Google search. I went in expecting to find at least something other than information about me, but I ended up with about six and a half million hits. That's a little scary. I, like any other person, want to know that I am an individual with an identity. But where does my online identity stop and my offline identity begin?
Here are some fairly uninteresting things about me: I go to St Paul's School, I have blond hair, I cycle to school most mornings. However, this is only part of my offline identity. If you really wanted to you could, with the internet, find out my discipline record throughout school, my political views, my full date of birth, my parents' salaries, my teachers' Facebook passwords and goodness only knows what else. The amount of personal information available through the web is terrifying.
It isn't only the internet. There are devices we use every day that record information about our spending habits, our whereabouts, who we contact. For example: some time ago my dad had to be airlifted off a ski slope because of an injury at considerable personal expense. Within about 36 hours his bank had phoned him to ask what had cost so much. The Problem is that with so much financial information on the internet, it is becoming more common to see people trying to steal your identity and use bank details and the like to their advantage - identity theft. Your Oyster card keeps track of where you are - if that information fell into the wrong hands, think of the trouble it could cause. The Metropolitan Police requested information about specific Oyster card whereabouts 436 times between August 2004 and March 2006. Phone companies are constantly keeping tabs on you so that they can unlock phones and help us out of trouble, but this could pose a significant threat to our privacy if they fell into the wrong hands. Is Big Brother watching us? Is it bad or good that we have all this information floating about in cyberspace?
Thankfully, there are lots of things that can help us stay safe on the web. Things like Roboform, a program for PCs, allows you to store all your passwords and details and access them via one "master-phrase" so that you don't juggle passwords, hackers don't get near your data and filling out forms online can be done quicker. To me this is a brilliant idea: it is doubtful (but not impossible) that we will ever find an answer to computer security that doesn't involve some recollection on our part, but Roboform offers to do that for us. Similar products include 1Password for Mac and Password Safe for all computers. The problems come when people misunderstand or just ignore safety policies. Did you know that Facebook can change its privacy policy at any point and we wouldn't necessarily be notified? Safety with web identity depends on us following the rules.
Another safety feature that techies swear by is encrypted data. This is when instead of passwords, which can be cracked quite easily by humans, computers invent a code that makes all your information into gibberish for all those who don't know the code or cipher. The cipher can be translated by a special key, which tells you what the actual information says. These keys can have various bit values - the higher the bit value, the more possible combinations there are. For example, a 56-bit key allows more than 70 quadrillion (70 000 000 000 000 000) combinations. That, I'm sure you'll agree, is quite impressive for a key the fraction of the size of a blank word document. Read more about it here. Encryption is used in computers for all sorts of things, among them protecting personal data and therefore your identity from people, which is rather reassuring.
Another interesting advance in the field of technological identity has come in the shape of the Google Profile (here is the unofficial Google blog explanation). Google is becoming a social network with things like intelligent address books where your contacts are "friends" and calling emails "conversations". To this avail it has a new feature that lets those who you allow to view it access all the social networks you want your friends to see. Cool. A network that lets you access blogs, Facebook and Twitter, all in one place. It looks like it will be big - really big. It also shares all your contact details, though, and when you can be searched on the web that might not be so good. But never fear, Google lets you choose who sees the important stuff. Read more here.
So. Places you can have profiles or an identity: Facebook, blogs, microblogs, instant messenger, the list goes on. Even your email is likely to disclose some information about you: my email is the name of where some of my cousins live. Some people like to use their names. Interesting (if slightly odd) psychological questions: does our email address show who we really are? If not that, what does? Is our Facebook or our blog who we are online and offline, one, the other, both? Are we safe in the knowledge that our data is safe under password or encryption? I suppose that we will only know what's safe when we are let down by it.
Here are some worthwhile videos.
Another video, this time about how we identify ourselves to websites.
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