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Archive for the ‘privacy’ Category

Privacy Is About Control, Not Anonymity

10.09.22

Seth Godin says you don’t really care about privacy:

“If you cared about privacy you wouldn’t have a credit card, because, after all, they know everything you spend money on. And you wouldn’t use the phone, because somewhere, there’s a computer scanning what you say.

What most of us care about is being surprised. You don’t want the credit card company to track where you’re staying and whether you’re buying flowers for someone you’re not even married to–and then send you a free coupon for STD testing…”

I think Seth missed the mark with this one. I don’t care if my credit card company, Amazon, Google or Facebook have my information. I don’t even care if they use it to target ads at me. You know what I want?

Control.

I want control over how companies use my information. I want to know that if I post a photo of someone online, and set it so that only my friends can see it, then ONLY my friends will see it (though I still maintain that if you’re not ok with everyone seeing your photos, then don’t post them online at all).

I don’t need to put on a tin foil hat and go off the grid in order to care about privacy. I just need confidence that I can control how my information is used, and the means to do so.

How about you?

Posted in: privacy

Tags: privacy

13Comments

Four Lessons From PleaseRobMe.com

10.02.19

The social media scene has been buzzing this week with stories about PleaseRobMe.com, a new site which aggregates publicly shared posts from shiny new location-based service Foursquare. The aim of the site is to draw attention to the risks posed by posting your current location publicly.

While the way the site goes about things is deliberately distasteful (it wouldn’t grab many headlines with “Out And About” as a name, after all), there’s a useful message behind the obnoxiousness. As the site points out, “So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home.”

After chatting with a journalist today who says she’s been seeing more and more reports of people cancelling their Foursquare accounts as they realize the implications of the service, I reflected that it’s a good time to consider a few privacy basics:

Think it through. Would you share your home address with a stranger on the street? No? Then don’t do it online. Also, if you check into your home address on Foursquare, you need your head examined. As the makers of PleaseRobMe.com said for an interview with WebProNews, “We think it’s important to realize that something you post on Twitter isn’t necessarily private. Everybody is able to read it, unless you protect your messages.”
Choose your friends carefully. More so than on some other sites, “friending” people on location-based services gives them real access to your life. I have a couple of hundred of friend requests on Foursquare which I’ll probably never accept because I don’t know the person requesting the connection. Think before you accept everyone.
Find the right service for you. While Foursquare doesn’t have too many privacy settings (though you can turn off the auto-tweet function), only your friends can see your updates. If that’s not enough for you, other services like BrightKite (as RWW points out) offer more rigorous controls.
Don’t blow it out of proportion. If you go to work every day; the regular, predictable period when you’re out is probably much more of a target for burglars than your pint at the local pub (especially if you aren’t actually attached at the hip to your partner and they don’t automatically follow you everywhere you go).

What do you think? Are these kinds of stories changing your opinion of location-based services or are these concerns overblown?

Posted in: location, privacy, social networks

Tags: location, privacy, social networks

29Comments

Where’s The Line With Location-Based Apps and Privacy?

09.12.26

Loic Le Meur wrote yesterday about My Tracks – an application for Android phones which uses your phone’s GPS chip to track your location in real-time. Along with location, you can use it to look back later at things like your elevation, distance and speed.

This isn’t the first app to offer this kind of functionality. Google Latitude offers auto-updating location features, and I’ve used a Garmin Forerunner 405 for a while to log my runs.

It seems that location-based apps like Foursquare are so ‘last week’ already. As Loic says, “why not just check in automatically if I accepted that the app does this for me”?

While it’s much easier to have an app that doesn’t need manually updating, the check-in system does offer its own benefits. One of the key ones is enhanced security.

There are likely times you just don’t want to broadcast your location. What’s more, you may also want to reduce the likelihood of some creepo finding out where you live because you forgot to turn the app off.

Setting my tin-foil hat aside, I think the reality is that this kind of feature will be fairly ubiquitous in a couple of years. Set that alongside the emergence of augmented reality applications, and we’re approaching a time when Minority Report-style advertising is a reality.

The question is will there eventually be a backlash to the erosion of personal privacy that this kind of application entails? Will concerns over this aspect prevent mainstream adoption of this kind of tool?

Posted in: location, privacy

13Comments

Is There Still A Personal/Professional Line?

09.03.03

“I feel a client should respect the fact that a personal Twitter or Facebook account is different from when your meeting with them or representing their brand.” – Marcus Andrews in a comment

An interesting division became apparent last week when I asked “Who are you online?” Of the different people who commeted, roughly half said that they acted differently online to offline. Some of the comments from that side:

“I am careful with networks that are open and searchable (Twitter, e.g.) to not say anything that might hinder me in the future.”
“I pride myself on staying true to my beliefs, but I will change what I say and how I say it depending on the group I’m in.”
“I try to keep it industry related as I’m trying to learn as much as I can from all of the PR professionals that I’m fortunate to have access to.”
“Regardless of the medium, I always assume my professional contacts may come across what I say and how I behave online.”
“I definitely act more professional online than I do in my everyday life.”
“Personally I am very different online than offline. It’s not that I’m a bad person or anything offline, I’m just less colorful when I’m online.”

It’s hard to stay professional at all times. Working late last Friday night, I got mad at my computer when it started playing up just as I was about to leave the office, and I vented about it on Twitter. I then got mad at myself (offline) for venting online. Does that reflect poorly on me? Or is it perfectly acceptable to show that you’re human occasionally? Meanwhile, I know I frequently self-censor after re-considering things I’m about to post.

This raises some interesting questions when it comes to companies using Internet research during their recruitment:

If online content is written with employers in mind, does it really reflect the person?
Should we disregard online content when recruiting, or is this another way to find the people with the smarts to be professional online?
Perhaps most intriguingly: Should employers and clients respect the line between professional and personal? Does that line even exist any more?

What do you think?

Posted in: privacy

Tags: career, personal, professional, self-censor

25Comments

Be Careful What You Save

09.02.18

Be careful what you save in Delicious.

To be a little more specific – be careful how you save things in Delicious.

Social bookmarking

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. This means that, while Delicious is great for replacing your bloated “favourites” list in your browser, there are also sharing features built-in. This is helpful for teams working in the online space – you can easily tag something as “for: [someone]” to send it to them – but it also brings with it a few other considerations.

Network with care

One of my favourite features in Delicious is the ability to form a network of contacts (here’s mine). When you add people to your network, you can easily subscribe to all of their bookmarks in an RSS reader (I’ve mentioned this before when looking at 6 ways to make your life easier with Delicious). Pretty neat, huh?

Unless you don’t want other people to see the things you’re bookmarking, that is. Maybe you’re working on a new business project, or trying to do something to surprise someone, or *gasp* bookmarking job postings.

Now, Delicious has a “Do not share” feature that prevents others from seeing the sites you save. Problem solved, you would think. But what if you forget to check the “do not share” box when you save the article? No problem, surely – you can just go back and click it later, right?

Wrong.

Yes, you can go back and un-share your bookmarks. Yes, that will remove that bookmark from the public list of sites you’ve saved.

No, it won’t remove them from RSS feeds.

An example

I recently had a conversation with someone about using Delicious to save research they were conducting. We discussed the importance of making their bookmarks private.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I glanced at my RSS reader a while later and saw numerous bookmarks from that person on the topic we’d just discussed. When I searched the person’s saved bookmarks on Delicious itself they were gone – they’d obviously corrected the error – but they’re now stored forever in my Google Reader results.

Once again, a useful reminder – be careful what you do online.

Posted in: best practices, privacy, social media, tools

Tags: delicious, privacy, social bookmarking

7Comments

A Quick Thought On Online Privacy

08.05.21

tin-foil hat A quick thought, prompted by Colin McKay at last night’s Third Tuesday Toronto event (with Katie Paine, Marshall Sponder and Marcel Lebrun), on online privacy…

People who are part of the social media community know that when you put something online publicly, it gets indexed by search engines and is effectively ‘out there’ for people to see forever. By posting information online, we’re making a choice to make it available to other people. We take that for granted.

If someone doesn’t realize they’re making that choice – if they don’t realize that’s what’s happening – is it still right to mine that information in the same way? Does our technical ability to do it trump that consideration?

Taking aside the obvious implication that there may be a lot of education necessary about this stuff, what’s your take on this?

(Photo credit: CR4)

Posted in: privacy

Tags: Colin McKay, privacy

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