I’m quite pleased to learn that Facebook has come to a privacy epiphany. I’ve been blogging a lot lately about the privacy problems with Facebook’s new features — Beacon and Social Ads:
* Facebook’s Beacon: News Feeds All Over Again?
* The Facebook-Fandango Connection: Invasion of Privacy?
* Facebook and the Appropriation of Name or Likeness Tort
* The New Facebook Ads — Starring You: Another Privacy Debacle?
On December 8, 2007, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project will be holding a conference about online reputation called Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. I’ll be participating in the symposium and will be talking about my book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. Other participants include Alessandro Acquisti, Michel Bauwens, Danielle Citron, John Clippinger, William McGeveran, Urs Gasser, Rishab A. Ghosh, Ashish Goel, Eric Goldman, Auren Hoffman, Darko Kirovski, Mari Kuraishi, Hassan Masum, Beth Noveck, Vipul Ved Prakash, Bob Sutor, Mozelle Thompson, Rebecca Tushnet, and Jonathan Zittrain.
According to a recent Newsweek story, there are 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States. That’s about 1 camera for every 10 Americans.
Next month, an interesting new movie called Look will be released that is filmed entirely with surveillance cameras. From the Newsweek story:
Is privacy an issue of concern to voters in the 2008 presidential election? Which candidates do voters think will best protect privacy?
These questions are addressed in a new poll by the Ponemon Institute. According to Bob Sullivan’s discussion of the poll in MSNBC’s Red Tape blog:
Over at The Book Page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the winners for the worst book title have been announced. Nominees include:
I previously blogged about the Megan Meier case, where some adults created a fake MySpace account to torment a teenage girl (Megan Meier). The adults pretended to be a boy who befriended Megan online and won her affections, only to viciously dump her and hurl insults at her. The incident led to Megan’s suicide.
The newspaper that reported the story opted not to include the names of the adults who engaged in the cyber-bullying of Megan. The journalists concluded that it could spark vigilantism against the adults and their children, and therefore decided not to report their names.
Enter the blogosphere. As Kim Zetter writes in her terrific story at Wired:
I recently blogged about Facebook’s Beacon, where it adds information to user profiles of their purchases at participating external websites such as Fandango. Beacon is starting to spark a privacy outcry among Facebook users. From the AP:
This post responds to more reviews of my new book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press, Oct. 2007). I posted Part I of my responses to reviews here. This is Part II.
Over at Wired’s Threat Level blog, Kim Zetter discusses a story of cyberbullying that led to a suicide and a newspaper’s decision to not reveal the identities of the responsible parties:
Facebook recently rolled out a new advertising program called Social Ads, where Facebook users’ images, names, and words are used to help advertise products and services. I blogged about Facebook’s Social Ads here and here, contending that they are likely a violation of the tort of appropriation of name or likeness as well as the right to publicity tort.
Peter Lattman at the WSJ Blog has a great new post about Facebook that throws in another even more troubling wrinkle: