[Air-l] Facebook protests

[Andrea Forte]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Mark Bell wrote:

> In terms of being retroactive it is the aggregation of the changes being
> retroactive not the changes themselves. All of these changes were logged in
> profiles already.

from my perspective that's not ENTIRELY true... last week you would have
had to save a copy of a person's profile and do a diff everyday to see
exactly what they had changed. Now I see exactly what bits of information
a person decided to remove about themselves, for example. Sure, it was all
public in the first place, but it's new information. I don't think the
front porch analogy works here. It's more like following someone for a
week and recording every public thing he/she does and then publishing it.
It was all public, right? So it doesn't affect privacy?

I'm not a privacy scholar, but for example, I think that the public
information that I was in Rome buying a shirt at a particular souvenir
stand and the information that I gave my dad a real dolce and gabbana
shirt at his birthday party (I didn't!!! :-) ) are two public pieces of
information that, aggregated and distributed, would constitute new
information about me.

Surely someone smarter than me has written about this somewhere. :-)

Andrea





>
>
> On 9/7/06, Andrea Forte <aforte at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> >
> >
> > >
> > > The changes definitely change personal information flow but they don't
> > > affect privacy. It may affect "perceived" privacy but anything a student
> > > puts up on Facebook has to be seen as no longer private.
> >
> > I've been thinking about this a lot myself, (as a Facebook user who is
> > creeped out by the feeds! :-))
> >
> > Does privacy intersect with the ways that information is aggregated? Does
> > it affect privacy if disparate pieces of information that were once
> > difficult to find, assemble and understand are suddenly aggregated with
> > descriptive icons and temporal information? I'd argue that this DOES
> > affect privacy.
> >
> > Aside from that, the changes are retroactive, so activities that were
> > performed under old expectations of use are now displayed in this new,
> > aggregated form. This seems like a pretty egregious error when it comes to
> > designing around users' expectations of privacy...
> >
> > Andrea
> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Mark Bell
> MA student in Ball State University's Digital Storytelling program
> http://www.storygeek.com
> "The future is here...it's just not widely distributed." - Tim O'Reilly
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