Staying safe on line

A panel discussion now, Cory Doctorow and Matthias Klang discussing staying safe online, the dark side of apps and social networks.

Cory up first. Three ideas about changing the way we look at privacy.

Need to keep kids safe, but should we spy on them, harvest what they're doing? How does that teach them to respect privacy. better to teach them to detect surveillance and become intelligent consumers. Could turn our kids into advocates for their own Internet privacy.
Find out what's over blocked and under blocked. Then gather info about kids get around it. Because they do! Then use FoI laws to find out what schools are doing, what they're paying, and research the companies. Then publish it. Teach kids to think critically about privacy and that they should steps to protect it.

How do we become an intelligent user of services that collect our private information, especially in return for free services? We give up all sorts of information about ourselves, browsing history, location etc. Use technology. Analogous to blocking pop ups. Need to turn off some third party cookies. Cookie blockers or plug ins. Just leave those on that do work for us like keeping us logged in.

Also need to do something about mobile privacy. When you install an app it knows all sorts about you, including who you're speaking to, location etc. Usually have to agree to all Ts and Cs, not some of them, should only send info that's valuable to us. Example, location data is useful to an app for healing cabs, but not to to others.

Now Matthias.
The unexpected depth of shallow media.
The Millennium, the year of the I Love You virus. Lots of rules about using the Internet. Don't give your real names on line, or your age, or your sexual orientation.
Then Mark Zuckerberg came along, and we told him everything.
Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphones.
Then we needed something to do with it, and apps were invented.

Social media timeline, end of the communications monopoly.


Also the end of boredom! We're constantly being entertained, but we want to take part. The performance lifestyle!

I love this:




How do these tools affect society? How are things controlled and why aren't politicians passing laws to protect us? Because they don't want to because at the moment we are under surveillance like never before.
Need to take some of our rights back. Start with End User Licence Agreements. It won't start with technology, will have to start with us.

Lots of interesting questions. How do you keep very young children safe? Don't use blockers they don't work. Be in the room with them. Keep an eye on what they're doing. Be prepared to explain things. Guide their Internet habits.

Also a good discussion about social media around the BBC newsnight story and the incorrect assumption that Lord McAlpine was a child abuser. The Paul Chambers case also got a good airing with everyone in agreement that it should never have been a case. Lots of discussion about freedom of speech on social networks.

Great session.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Privacy and Publicity

The keynote today was from Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, and was about privacy issues faced by young people using social media. Excellent thought provoking talk. The following are notes of the main points, haven't got time to turn it into a proper post.

Privacy is a complex issue to young people, especially around social media. Its about the freedom to control a situation.

Why do young people participate in social media?. It becomes an absolute social necessity. The equivalent of the mall. You go to see and be seen. Failure to participate means you're excluded from a lot of social culture. Facebook the dominant player. Ynd people tell you that you're expected to be on Facebook. If not, you'll be asked why and you'd better have a good reason.

Facebook, text messaging are the main ones at he moment, but will change. There will be shifts and transitions. Already are niche sites eg tumblr, twitter. But what drives particpation is the ability to be there because everyone else is there. Theres a constant flow of information.

Concept of the networked public. Spaces that are constructed through networked technologies as well as the imagined communities formed by people coming together.
People want to be in a public, but don't want everything they've said to be public for the world to see.

Teens recognise that a fundamental change is happening. Things are becoming public by default, private by effort.
Need to make choices over what to make private. It's easier to make things public than private. Eg post all photos, tag, wait for people to complain before remove them. Share first, take down later.

But there's still private communication in all of these networks. People choose what to make private. Most is public. Why bother hiding it?

Password sharing very high, probably about 50%. Yng people say it's a way of feeling connected. Very difficult for us to understand!

Young people are learning about different audiences. Eg employers. They're learning, put things up, take them down. Unexpected audiences are a real challenge to them.
Quotes from teenager: " I wouldn't go to my teachers page and look at their stuff, so why should they look at mine"
"Facebook is for friends, not for my mum, why doesn't she understand that"
"Everyone disappears after the mom post".
They need parents to understand social boundaries - Just because it's accessible doesn't mean you're welcome.

Interesting strategies that young people use to achieve privacy:
Asserting social norms. Eg status updates directed at different people. Get cross when the wrong people comment. Use different type of language when addressing different audiences.
Use technology. Eg block certain people from seeing certain things.
White walling. Log in everyday and remove posts from day before. Make Facebook real time.
Deactivate accounts when not being used. When not logged in, can't see anything. Becomes synchronous.
Hide the meaning of things by usingg references eg song lyrics that your friends will understand but your family won't. Access to meaning separated from access to content.

Social media has made things more visible. Lot of experimentation with how to make things private. Kids are not inherently digital natives. Not born knowing how to handle these issues.

We need to know about these issues so that we can help them navigate the complexity.
We can ask the critical questions to make people think and reflect and see things from a different perspective. Not judgemental ones.

Huge challenges we have to deal with in terms of giving students opportunities, but deal with privacy issues. Can't just expose them. We have to put down frameworks to help them. We have to understand the complexities of privacy and publicity in order to help them.

Patriot Act applies to cloud data in EU, shock horror.....

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about why concerns about privacy and security shouldn't be any more of a factor when looking at Google as a cloud provider than any other. One of the criticisms often leveled at them (and those of us who've put our services with them) is that they will not guarantee that our data is held in the EU, but that it is in the US as well. In that post, I said that the Patriot Act was a red herring. It  applies just as much to data held in the EU by US companies, but it's been quite difficult to convince people of this. I hope that this admission by Microsoft (which is about time - it's been well known for ages) that the Patriot Act applies to data held by them in the EU goes some way to getting it accepted!

Christmas ruined.....

Lots of news around about Facebook changing privacy settings after thousands of people protested that information about transactions they've made were being broadcast to their networks without their express consent. It came to a head when a guy in the US bought an eternity ring for his wife for Christmas - you can read the rest of the story here. I suppose it's a good job it was for his wife!

Another warning to everyone to keep an eye on the electronic footprint we all leave whenever we use the internet.

Electronic footprints

I'm interested in a story on the BBC web site about young people and social networking sites - it confirms my belief that we should be giving advice to students about privacy. I'm often surprised by the amount of personal information people post, including contact details, dates of birth, addresses, when they're on holiday. I think most of us would be surprised by the electronic footprint we're leaving. The Information Commissioner's Office has developed a web site for young people which has some good advice. Facebook for example has very good privacy settings, if only people used them.

Edit: When I wrote this, I hadn't seen the front page of today's Independent.

Staying safe online

Following on from the previous post, we've been thinking about giving students some advice on privacy, especially when using social networking sites such as Facebook, and we've had some preliminary discussions with the Student Union. I do have concerns about the amount of information some people post about themselves and make available to large numbers of people - phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth, when they're going on holiday. More than enough for some form of identity theft to take place, or indeed stalking.

I discovered today that Cardiff University have produced some excellent guidelines:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/it/help/safe/facebook.html

which of course we wouldn't dream of plagiarising...