dan mcquillan's List: introduction to social media IS51020A - lecture 2 - social networks & the dark side

• It is all down to his well-connectedness. And he is not alone in earning linchpin status for this reason. Postal workers, refuse collectors, crossing patrol attendants and the local branch of Sainsbury's could also play pivotal roles, according to Connected Communities, a hefty new piece of research published today by the RSA.
• public agencies and even charities go into deprived areas with an assumption that there's a lack of capable individuals
• it has set about identifying the "social capital"
• A quarter of the 280 people they talked to could not name anyone in their social network they thought was good at bringing people together or could help them contact someone with influence, power or responsibility to change things locally.
• The RSA will spend the next year feeding back the findings published in Connected Communities to residents, and helping them to design and test interventions based on these networks to address local problems. The project, Taylor explains, is about the "capacity of the community as a whole to reshape its destiny".
• But what will be the "bridging capital" that fosters links between New Cross Gate's middle-class residents up on Telegraph Hill and poorer residents in areas around the tube station? Community gardening at the Green Shoots project emerged as the activity that connected the people from the widest range of socio-economic backgrounds.
• But how much will communities want to join up? The RSA admits that building bridging capital will not always be easy: its research suggested a division between affluent Telegraph Hill and the rest of the area. Although there were some residents who recognised the importance of constructive networks between different areas, one respondent told the team: "You could draw a huge black line between Telegraph Hill and New Cross Gate. Not many from Telegraph Hill pass down this way."

• Nonetheless, Taylor believes Connected Communities' approach and findings have much to offer. "Traditional public policy interventions tend to be big, expensive, risk averse, and hoping to improve things marginally," he says.

  "Social network interventions are the reverse in all regards: they're small, risky – most will fail – and cheap. But they will occasionally achieve remarkable effects."

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• At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment.
• Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines.
• I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

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• On LiveJournal, public events and occurrences are brought to attention with the help of user-generated ‘blogwaves' [ru], and the media permanently monitor what is emerging there.
• A classic example of this is a VKontakte group called Informal Public Association – Healthcare for Children! [ru], which was created by Daria Makarova, a young mother from Novosibirsk who lost her child. The goal of this group is to promote changes in the area of children's healthcare in the Novosibirsk region. Within a few months of existence, six thousand people had already joined. This group is leading an active campaign: holding meetings with the directors of Novosibirsk's healthcare system, employing experts, monitoring the condition and requirements of the region's children's hospitals, and carrying out fundraising activities.
• when the driver of the head of Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations, Sergey Shoygu, threatened to kill the blogger archeornis who recounted the story on the LiveJournal page of the Society of Blue Buckets and also uploaded a video.
• A classic example of this is a VKontakte group called Informal Public Association - Healthcare for Children! [ru], which was created by Daria Makarova, a young mother from Novosibirsk who lost her child. The goal of this group is to promote changes in the area of children's healthcare in the Novosibirsk region. Within a few months of existence, six thousand people had already joined. This group is leading an active campaign: holding meetings with the directors of Novosibirsk's healthcare system, employing experts, monitoring the condition and requirements of the region's children's hospitals, and carrying out fundraising activities.

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• New policy: “We may put together your current city with GPS and other location information we have about you to, for example, tell you and your friends about people or events nearby, or offer deals to you that you might be interested in. We may also put together data about you to serve you ads that might be more relevant to you.

• Even if someone is not a Facebook user or is not logged in, Facebook's social plug-ins collect the address of the Web page being visited and the Internet address of the visitor as soon as the page is loaded--clicking on the Like button is not required. If enough sites participate, that permits Facebook to assemble a vast amount of data about Internet users' browsing habits.
• "If you put a Like button on your site, you're potentially selling out your users' privacy even if they never press that button," says Nicole Ozer, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.
• In the last few months, scrutiny of the privacy practices of the Internet's second most popular Web site has reached an all-time high, with politicians threatening probes and privacy activists calling for formal investigations.
• How it works: Facebook wants publishers to insert an iframe or JavaScript in the HTML for their Web pages. As soon as the page is loaded, the code invokes a PHP script at Facebook.com that records information including the URL for the Web page, your IP address, and your Facebook ID (if you're authenticated). If a publisher uses Facebook's Javascript API, the simpler option, here's what the embedded Like button for CNET.com would look like: <fb:like href="cnet.com" font="tahoma"></fb:like>

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• Facebook's facial recognition feature that helps users tag photos. After joining in the chorus of European nations that objected to the feature launch in June, German authorities are now the first to declare the feature illegal. 
• "If the data were to get into the wrong hands, then someone with a picture taken on a mobile phone could use biometrics to compare the pictures and make an identification," Caspar told the Hamburger Abendblatt. "The right to anonymity is in danger."
• Last July, Caspar launched a similar case against Facebook for saving data of people who hadn't even signed up for the social network. Like they're now doing more aggressively with their facial recognition feature, Facebook collected data about non-Facebook users through the Friend Finder feature and then stored it without permission.
• Germany has among some of the strictest data protection and privacy laws in the European Union, largely created in the wake of informational abuses perpetrated by the Nazis and the Stasi, the East German secret police. One of the foundational concepts of German data protection law is that no data can be collected without the express consent of the user.

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• Facebook says it is not required to give you a copy of some of your personal data as it could adversely affect the company’s trade secrets and intellectual property.

• His office decided to investigate the company after Europe versus Facebook’s 22 complaints were covered repeatedly in the media. For reference again, here are all the complaints:

   
   
  1. Pokes are kept even after the user “removes” them.
   
  2. Facebook is collecting data about people without their knowledge. This information is used to substitute existing profiles and to create profiles of non-users.
   
  3. Tags are used without the specific consent of the user. Users have to “untag” themselves (opt-out). Note: Facebook has announced changes for this.
   
  4. Facebook is gathering personal data e.g. via its iPhone-App or the “friend finder”. This data is used by Facebook without the consent of the data subjects.
   
  5. Postings that have been deleted showed up in the set of data that was received from Facebook.
   
  6. Users cannot see the settings under which content is distributed that they post on other’s pages.
   
  7. Messages (incl. Chat-Messages) are stored by Facebook even after the user “deleted” them. This means that all direct communication on Facebook can never be deleted.
   
  8. The privacy policy is vague, unclear and contradictory. If European and Irish standards are applied, the consent to the privacy policy is not valid. Facebook tried improving it earlier this year.
   
  9. The new face recognition feature is an disproportionate violation of the users right to privacy. Proper information and an unambiguous consent of the users is missing.
   
  10. Access Requests have not been answered fully. Many categories of information are missing.
   
  11. Tags that were “removed” by the user, are only deactivated but saved by Facebook.
   
  12. In its terms, Facebook says that it does not guarantee any level of data security.
   
  13. Applications of “friends” can access data of the user. There is no guarantee that these applications are following European privacy standards.
   
  14. All removed friends are stored by Facebook. This was reconfirmed recently.
   
  15. Facebook is hosting enormous amounts of personal data and it is processing all data for its own purposes. It seems Facebook is a prime example of illegal “excessive processing”.
   
  16. Facebook is running an opt-out system instead of an opt-in system, which is required by European law.
   
  17. The Like Button is creating extended user data that can be used to track users all over the internet. There is no legitimate purpose for the creation of the data. Users have not consented to the use.
   
  18. Facebook has certain obligations as a provider of a “cloud service” (e.g. not using third party data for its own purposes or only processing data when instructed to do so by the user).
   
  19. The privacy settings only regulate who can see the link to a picture. The picture itself is “public” on the internet. This makes it easy to circumvent the settings.
   
  20. Facebook is only deleting the link to pictures. The pictures are still public on the internet for a certain period of time (more than 32 hours).
   
  21. Users can be added to groups without their consent. Users may end up in groups that lead other to false impressions about a person.
   
  22. The policies are changed very frequently, users do not get properly informed, they are not asked to consent to new policies.

• How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

• A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

   

    They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

   

    It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

   

    “We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”

   

    They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers