The Great Privacy Debate

It seems you cannot go anywhere on the internet these days without someone arguing about the privacy concerns of this website, or that technology, but to the average everyday person, what does all of this really mean? Consider this, millennials are going to be the first generation where your birth and government records, your school records, your health records, and your “likes” are all electronic, and in many cases easily accessible. The fact that this information is out there may not be an issue alone, but when large companies aggregate that information to create a dossier on you, and then target adds to the person they think you are, it can be a little creepy. In 2012 Target was able to predict and determine that a girl was pregnant, even before her father did. Target had (based on its prediction the girl was pregnant) sent coupons to the girl that matched products she would need at that stage of her pregnancy. All of that was based purely on purchasing habits over a few months of one credit card.

Now at the same time no one is advocating for using only cash at the grocery store, deleting your Facebook right now, or closing your Gmail because Google scans it, because those services are useful. I literally wouldn't be able to do any work if I didn't have a Facebook account. Perhaps though a middle ground can be reached, one where we don’t volunteer every bit of our interests to the world for examination, but we also don’t live as shut-ins wearing tin-foil hats. Below I have compiled some of the easiest ways to reduce some of the data available about you on the internet. Next week is going to be an outline of the legal rights you have regarding your data (spoiler: it’s not a lot).

Facebook

Large data aggregation companies mine Facebook, twitter, and any other social media sites to get more information about what you like (advertisers) and your habits/history (Background checks). One of the easiest ways that you can prevent your information from getting out there is to change your posting from the default friends of friends to friends. For example if you post a picture of you and your friends drinking, that gets shared with your 2,000 or so friends, and if it’s also shared with friends of friends, suddenly 4,000,000 people have access to the photo. Facebook actually has a handy little tool that allows you to change all of your previous posts to friends or private if you want to hide all of your old stuff, but keep in mind this won’t affect a third party that already has your information. You can also in the privacy settings make it so that your profile is not searchable on the internet (so getting to it from google for example), but anyone with a Facebook account will still be able to search it in Facebook’s search engine. Finally, make sure to manage things you are tagged in carefully, if you are tagged in a friend’s photo, you have no control over who its shared with, only your friend does.

Google Products

Gmail: There is nothing you can do except change add settings in your general Google profile. This is done by going to settings in your Google profile, then privacy/adds, and selecting the opt out option for everything.

Google Chrome: Although your protections on paper (in the contract you accept when installing) are very limited, Google does offer some helpful extensions to reduce the ability of sites to collect data on you as you are browsing. The first is the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on, and the second is Keep My Opt-Outs, both are by google, and both help to stop advertising cookies from landing on your computer. Of course if you really want to eliminate the ability for cookies to land on your machine at all you can do so manually in the settings of Chrome, although the result is a browser that is almost non-functional.
Google+: Essentially any information you put in your about profile for Google+ is automatically public, period. So, only put up what you would feel comfortable everyone knowing about you.

If you live in Europe you have the ability to request google take down certain search results. How that process works is rather unclear as it requires you to (Currently as of 9/18/2014) submit a legal action, but that process may become more straightforward with time.

I accept the terms and conditions

In theory of course you should be always reading the terms and conditions before you click accept because clicking that button is the same as signing your legal signature, but in reality no one does that. Instead most of us just hit the button and then go back to what we were doing. Now to be fair most of us don’t have the time to read the 100+ pages of legal documentation that come with the iphone, so instead one of the best ways to know if there is an issue is to google/bing/duckduckgo it. Chances are that even if you haven’t read the contract, someone else has, and they will have posted on the internet what you are signing away (if its anything important to them). Of course if you do have the time, read the privacy section because that’s the most important part, everything else is usually just common sense.

Wikipedia Blackout

Happy 2012! Intersession is in full swing here at Hopkins, and most of the STS team is back in action. There's a lot going on in our little Production Room, ranging from modeling projects to internal reorganization,and good progress is being made.

But enough about us for today. Tomorrow an unprecedented event is going to happen to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protecting Internet Protocol Act (PIPA) across major sites on the internet: a blackout. The internet is literally going out for 24 hours.

Leading the way towards this dark path is information mogul Wikipedia, which will suspend its English language services for all of Wednesday, January 18 (you will still be able to access Wikipedia in other languages). Most websites participating in this blackout will return a 503 HTTP error message when anyone goes to their site. This, according to various Google+ posts, pages, and updates from major organizations, will help the "STOP SOPA" movement in two ways: the content on the site will be noted as "not real" and therefore will not be indexed; and even with the same "site offline" message on all the URLs, it won't cause duplicate content issues.

Some of you may wonder how the Googlebot web crawler is going to respond to the drop in available information on the blackout day. Concerns for this are relatively low, since it's only one day (a relatively short time compared to the amount of time it has spent crawling already), and most people think the crawler's ability to reach a site like Wikipedia will remain as high as before the blackout, therefore able to recover quickly afterwards.

The internet is exploding with people across the country and the world protesting SOPA and PIPA. Twitter has introduced a #stopsopa tag, and anyone who is supporting the blackout can tag it at any time today or tomorrow. People are changing their pictures to Stop SOPA banners, posting on news sites about this act, and basically spreading their word and opinions as quickly and widely as they can.

Other giants are taking measures not as extreme as a blackout, but they are still protesting. Google will put out a doodle tomorrow to protest SOPA, and while Twitter says it would be "foolish" to shut down an international business site to protest the legislation of one nation, it too has spoken out against SOPA.

But for all of this frenzy, what is SOPA even about? Basically, it would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to shut down a site suspected of piracy and make it all but vanish from the internet entirely. This obviously means sites that illegally post videos and music available for download will be shut down, but the major concerns against this are that it will allow the government to shut down legitimate sites that have free content. There is another clause, a DNS-blocking requirement, that would prevent computers from reaching overseas sites suspected of piracy. SOPA is the House of Representatives version of PIPA in the Senate, although both would meet the same end goals.

The supporters are mostly from Hollywood offices and record companies (MPAA/RIAA), who argue that by eliminating internet piracy, you are also eliminating the extra costs that go with it, which will overall reduce prices. The internet and technology advocates argue that it's too much government involvement in their businesses, and what's to stop people from breaking the system even if SOPA passes? Even top officials in Homeland Security think that clauses like the DNS-blocker will be a great blow to national security. The fear of the dangers of this act is real, and the government is sitting up and taking notice.

The White House officially took a stand against SOPA over the holiday break, mostly in response to what the people have been saying directly on the internet. (This is a perfect example of power deriving from the consent of the governed, no?) In the wake of so much opposition, Republicans and Democrats alike are backing out of support for these bills, or amending them to assuage the public. The legislation on SOPA has stalled until "outstanding concerns" have been addressed, but PIPA is still "alive and kicking," according to Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.

This is the first time in a long time that many groups of people, from corporations to a teenager, have agreed on one thing and attacked it with full-force. With so many decrying SOPA and PIPA, it's a wonder that anyone can support it. There is a real chance this legislation will pass, and that will affect how the First Amendment rights are advocated for in courts of law and enforced in public for years to come.

Our nation is dependent on technology, and to pass SOPA would mean that everyone would lose. That's what Wikipedia and the rest of the internet are trying to prove.

Facebook Settings 101: Privacy Settings

This is the second of three posts about the basics of Facebook settings. If you didn't read it, you might want to go back and look at the first post, which talks about Facebook's Account Settings.

Before you start looking at your privacy settings on Facebook, it's probably a good idea to click on Account (at the top of the page) and go to "Edit Friends". One of the really useful things about this page is that it allows you to organize your friends in different lists. A default list will be friends who belong to your network. You can set up additional lists, though, which is a good idea since it will help you control who can see what on your profile (you might not want your great aunt to see the same things your best friend can see). We're used to giving out information freely, but it's safer and wiser to think about what people really need to know about you and to tell people only what you really want them to know. So, I'd recommend setting up at least one additional list to help you control who can see what.

Now, if you click on "Account" and then select "Privacy Settings" you can start setting things up. The first screen you see gives you a quick glance at your privacy settings and allows you to choose from several preset options for controlling your privacy. It is a bad idea to use the "Everyone" preset as that will allow anyone to access all of your information posted on Facebook. The best option is probably to choose the "Recommended" preset and then customize it from there.

Clicking on "Customize settings"brings up a page where you can create settings for each category of information. I won't go into detail about what each category of personal information means (it's mostly self-explanatory); instead, I want to focus on the button with a padlock on it to the right of each category (except "Allow friends to post on my wall"). Clicking that button lets you choose from five options for who can see that category of information: Everyone, Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Only Friends, and Custom.

You can see the role that Networks (we talked about them in the post about Account Settings) play in privacy settings. You can imagine the privacy setting options as a set of concentric rings. At the center is you, then your friends, then your friends' friends, then your network(s), then everyone. As you go farther out there are more people. So, if you don't want a lot of people to see your information, you have to set your privacy settings accordingly.

You might have some friends who you don't want to let see as much as other friends are able to see. If this is the case, you should use the "Custom" option. Clicking "Custom" brings up a window with two parts: "Make this visible to:" and "Hide this from:". This allows you to control who can see or not see that category of information down to the levels of individuals. Here you can also use the lists of people you have set up to control your privacy. It's a lot easier than selecting people one at a time.

Just a couple of notes about the rest of these settings:

• Facebook recently simplified the privacy settings so it's a good idea to look at them if you haven't in a while.
• You can set the privacy options for your photo albums by clicking "Edit album privacy." It's important to do this because the default settings for your photo albums may not be what you want them to be.
• It's not a good idea to let everyone see your contact information. Remember that everyone means everyone, not just your friends, not just your networks, and not even just people on Facebook.
• You can see what your Facebook profile looks like to different people by clicking on "Preview my Profile".