Crowdsourced personal data coming to a profile near you
I’ve slowly been (finally) getting to grips with the Facebook friends lists feature and have been noticing some interesting side effects of using it.
First of all, I finally know how to get Facebook to stop censoring my newsfeed. You add people to your “close friends” list, then you get every gory detail.
So next – do I want my lists to be cumulative or exclusive? Do I want close friends to appear in acquaintances as well? I opted for exclusive – if they are on one, then I won’t put them on the other.
Restricted friends – i.e. those friends you want to list (for whatever reason, friends hardly ever means “friends” on Facebook) that by default, you are happy to not see what you get up to. A smart move by Facebook as by giving this built-in censoring people will be happy to divulge more to the social network “safe” in the knowledge that their boss, parent or otherwise “don’t want to unfriend but don’t want to broadcast to” contact won’t see it.
The “smart lists” are interesting too – grouping those to have openly admitted to going to the same school, working at the same company or otherwise are members of something that is shared with you. But I notice that Facebook still offers up the rest of your friends as suggestions for adding to these lists too.
So, if I haven’t volunteered a piece of information – say which school I went to – but a number of my friends have, then it would be natural for them, if using the school smart list, to “add” me to their list for their school. The upshot is that even if I didn’t want to tell Facebook what school I went to, they don’t need me to anymore. The chances are that at least one of my friends will have put me in their “school” smart list.
This is like other people tagging me in photos but without me being able to opt out.
Crowdsourced personal tagging. Nice one Facebook – you seemed to have snuck that one in on us all and managed to align the incentives so that people will do it because its useful to them. Clever.
What’s next I wonder – smart lists for interests, sexual orientation, age, location? Oh yes, they already do that one – anyone I’m friends with can now tag me as a “local” friend and tell Facebook where I am whether I wanted to tell them or not.
Ok, so how about a generic framework for me to create my own list, add a set of people and then use the Facebook “like” system to categorise it in a way that is meaningful to me – with the side effect of telling Facebook everyone who (in my opinion) likes banana ice-cream, whilst building lego models at Justin Bieber gigs (or whatever criteria I’ve chosen to use).
And of course you’ll have no idea of how others have classified you. And you’ll have no option to refute it. I wonder how long it will be before there is a healthy third-party marketing business to work the system. How about a company paying people a penny to classify their friends with an interest in their product, so that ads for it float to the top of their Facebook page? You can already run “campaigns” to get more likes, visits, page views and so on (the scary one is paying $0.13 to “create a gmail account for me” … no prizes for guessing what that might be trying to circumvent …).
Getting your friends to “out you” on Facebook. Creepy yet? Oh yes. Good job that is a long way into the future … ahem, well actually, maybe it isn’t.
And of course, just deciding not to be part of this is probably non longer an option. Even if you’re not on Facebook, it probably doesn’t need you to be anymore – your friends can tell it all it needs to know. Just imagine the advertising opportunities for Facebook that already exist from sending emails to those not yet on Facebook based on what their friends have already volunteered about them.
Kevin.
Whats your royal wedding name then?
Heard an odd thing on the radio this morning – people inventing their royal wedding name by starting with Lord/Lady, using a great-grandparents forename and then creating a double-barrelled surname by taking the street where you live and appending the name of your first pet.
I think they missed a trick here – they should have asked for your mother’s maiden name, the street where you were born and your first pet’s name. That way you’d have the answers to three of the common ‘I’ve lost my password’, “security” questions …
In fact, why not write a Facebook or iPhone app that asks all these but also creates a “the first”, “the 2nd”, “the third”, etc hashed from your date of birth – then you’d get that too.
And while we’re at it, ask for Facebook credentials and post it to your wall (most people won’t know you don’t actually need to give a site your username and password for them to post to your wall, that Facebook provides federated identity services to third party sites).
Actually I’d be surprised if said app doesn’t already exist … let me know if you find it 
Kevin.
Its a hoax (oh no it isn’t … is it?)
There has been some interesting commentary about the recent (well, a week or so ago now) fad on facebook to change your profile picture to a cartoon character in aid of raising awareness about cruelty to children. It has led to media coverage, claims it was started by peodophiles, claims that its all a hoax, descriptions as a great example of slacktivism and many parodies, claiming that facebook has solved child abuse (including this CNN parody pic).
It does appear to have increased traffic to the NSPCC website and caused an upsurge in donations, so by what measure do you measure a hoax and increased awareness? Ok, so maybe the vast majority of people did nothing more than just change their profile picture, but maybe a small number of them did actually donate. And maybe more will remember the issue when its comes to thinking about supporting a cause in the future. Who knows. The NSPCC did acknowledged the support from the campaign via its own facebook page.
Regardless of your views on this particular campaign, it cannot be denied that if a cause like this catches peoples imaginations, it can spread very quickly. Slacktivism or not, social media can amplify significantly.
Of course, if the message that was spreading was somehow contrary to the views of the organisations it is claiming to support, then it might be a hard force to work against too …
Kevin.
Get Safe Online week coming up …
Apparently it is going to be ‘Get Safe Online week’ next week.
Well, I’ve recently heard that something like three quarters of all cyber crime incidents – phishing, malware, ID theft, credit card scams, possibly even dodgy phone calls, and so on – could probably be stopped if people followed some basic ‘cyber hygiene’ rules such as can be found on sites like Get Safe Online – www.getsafeonline.org.
So, in the interests of doing my bit, I would strongly recommend having a browse through the site. In fact, why not get ahead of the crowds and do it today!
Another good place to go for general information, especially about safe and sensible use of online social networks, is the Information Commissioner’s Office – see http://www.ico.gov.uk/youth.aspx.
Couple more resources to consider – Own Your Space – a free e-book download, and Facebook have a security page with useful info.
Kevin.
Bad Parenting blamed for Farmville bill
Got a link to this story this morning. An interesting read. Some kid managed to rack up £900 worth of credit card bill playing Farmville, oh well, it had to happen sooner or later. Nothing more to say about that, the mum seems very pragmatic about the whole thing. At least he didn’t buy a car on ebay.
What I found astounding though, is some of the comments to the post. I scanned to about half-way down and just had to stop reading. Most were saying ‘hey, you can’t blame anyone else, bad parenting is the cause!’. Well, really, have any of these people ever seen a 12 year old or actually played these games? Yes its stealing, and it sounds like there have been sanctions, but to say things like ‘I don’t think any 12 year old should have a mobile phone … all that stuff should come about between 16 – 18′ and similar comments? Some just don’t seem to have any appreciation of how much social life is conducted via a phone or online these days.
When I think of what used to happen when I was growing up – going on trips, courses, holidays, events, whatever and having that low when its all over, and you won’t see anyone to talk about your experiences for a week or so. Not so today. The pictures are on Facebook. They are talking about the trip for weeks on MSN. They are still exchanging texts. Even people who couldn’t come on the trip can participate if someone is posting comments and pictures as they go on Facebook. Its just such a different world.
As for those suggesting that she should have had full awareness of what the kid was doing online … well, companies spend a fortune on auditing and monitoring employees behaviours for security. It is not a trivial problem! Yes, you can turn on Parental Controls, yes you can log everything they do … but is anyone really suggesting that any busy mum can only let a child use the Internet when someone is watching or will have time (and the knowledge) to retrospectively examine what they have been up to?
The other main suggestion – lock up your credit cards. Hmm. Yes, that is practical in a busy household! Not to mention never typing it in, saying it over the phone or leaving it laying around where anyone could get the number …
Like any new tool or technology, it can be used for good or ill. You can’t police everything a teenager is going to do. All you can possibly hope for is to give them a sense of what is good or bad, safe or unsafe, responsible and not. They will always make their own mistakes, sometimes with extreme results like giving in to the temptation to start spending on a parent’s credit card (but then its not like Farmville actively discourages any spending from anyone!) All you can really hope for is that they learn from their mistakes. And yes, maybe a paper round or doing jobs would be the answer to this specific one (how long would it take to pay back £900 I wonder)!
The biggest problem is in providing an addictive game, but when all is said and done that’s essentially Zynga’s business model (as is Runescape, World of Warcraft, and all the rest), to people with no disposable income. But thats a common problem.
Everyone has opinions, but some of those shared in the comments to this story are quite scary. You’ve been reading mine.
Nod to Tervicz for the link.
Kevin.
Virtual Revolution
I’ve just finished watching the BBC’s Virtual Revolution programmes. These were presented by Aleks Krotoski and shown on 4 consecutive Saturday evenings a month or so ago.
It follows the evolution of the Internet from its humble beginnings as the ARPANET and a collection of academic networks, through the non-commercial era, to the dot-com boom and bust. Finally, it talks about how people like Amazon and Google worked out how to make money from the Internet by exploiting out information in exchange for us using their services for free. We get the benefits of the services and haven’t really had any negative impact, yet, from giving up our personal information to them.
The final programme looks at the whole issue of online social networks such as Facebook and looks at some of the, as yet unknown, future effects on society.
One interesting conclusion, well discussion but looking like a conclusion, is that the web seems to be encouraging more associative brain functions than linear … people prefering short, associated chunks of information rather than large, linear books. This is one reason that many of ‘generation web’ don’t read books!
A very interesting series.
Kevin.
