Privacy is Essential, Safety is Presumed
Privacy is essential to trust, and trust is essential to use.
Facebook won in the college space because it enabled college
students to interact with their only natural college communities,
and only with those communities. Each college was isolated and
protected from the rest of the internet, sharing a safe private
space. Building on natural, existing communities leverages their
existing feelings of trust among members.
Not only can you be anyone on the internet, you can also be no
one. On myspace.com I’m K. B. “a naked hippie. no a sociopathic
killer” with interests ranging from “yoga, nuclear bombs, farming”
and right down to “the color teal”. And Tom (the founder of
myspace.com, who has 108 million friends today) and I happen to
have the same picture. Tom. (He had it first.) In other words, I
am obviously not myself on myspace.com. On Facebook, I am
about half of one of my real selves.
This is from a Columbia Spectator Staff Editorial on Jan 27, 2006,
which took me a while to find from my saved copy, because it
wasn’t easily googleable. Fortunately, I’d saved a copy with furl.
Right now, anyone with a Columbia e-mail address can
open an account and access a Columbia student’s
profile. This includes administrators, staff, and also
alumni, many of whom now work at firms that recruit
at Columbia.
Karel Baloun 71
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
Facebook is, at its heart, a public forum. The “terms of
use” and “privacy/security” sections of the Web site
make clear that by registering users are, in effect,
publicly releasing all information they enter. This is an
age of limited privacy, and students need to be acutely
aware of this. It is unfortunate but inevitable that
Facebook profiles will have to be more like resumes
than anything else. No one should have to explain to
an employer why they belong to such groups as
“Cocainia” or “I Wanna Get High.”
As far as I can tell, those statements are all accurate. Unless
someone is furling or otherwise saving your profile regularly (and
it only takes one furling or one save-as), you can sweep away
anything bad that’s on your profile, when you get to a point in
your life that it bothers you. Facebook also lets you carefully
tweak your privacy settings and is alert to abuse.
I’ve just read Bebo’s “Online Safety” pages and had a good laugh
at how they pretend to do what they can to keep it safe, by
handing out valuable tips like “your online friends are not like
your real friends” and “don’t tell people where you live”. Taking
their reasonable advice would require a complete change in usage
patterns.56
72 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
56 “Never divulge any personal information that could be used to find or identify
you in real life in a public forum. Password protect this information. This
information includes your real name, address, telephone number, mobile number,
your workplace, health club, or links to websites or other profiles that might give
this information away. It also includes this kind of information about your friends
and family. You may be sharing more information than you intended to by
including a pic with something showing in the photo.”
Kids use myspace to test out various identities, and to get
themselves into trouble whenever they put some real information.
The FBI uses it to catch pedophiles. Otherwise it’s a soft porn site
masquerading as a music site, and I do have to admit that some
of the chicks are quite hot. Go ahead and check it out for that,
but not so much that the FBI get after you.
Huh? Get after me?
Yes, duh. Everyone can know who you are on the internet, unless
you habitually use an anonymizer service57. Your IP address is
assigned by someone who can trace it to your account number,
and your identification information, and they are actually required
to give that to the authorities, and if the request is made under
the Patriot Act, they are actually not allowed to tell you that they
gave your information, or that they were even asked for it. Thank
you my big government friends, for keeping me so safe. Real
thanks Google, for keeping my faith in you alive by trying, alone
among search engines, to stand up to it, while continuing to
create useful features that further erode my privacy.
Karel Baloun 73
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
57 There are dozens of service and software providers in this privacy protection
space. Anonimizer.com sells software. FreeProxy.ru, as ironically we count on
Russians to protect our own privacy, has a list of proxies, as well as other
information. The Tor network provides intellectual heft, while HideMyAss is
instantly useful. Since over 98% of internet users now allow cookies, many
websites, including Facebook, Yahoo, Google and my own, require cookies for
authentication and other critical services, and anonymizers disallow cookies, which
at this time limits their usefulness. A proxy that stores cookies anonymously
seems like a logical next step.
My dad, who grew up behind the iron curtain and escaped
illegally, feels nostalgic these days. Younger readers, think Russia
and the communist menace. Remember? That’s why we did
Vietnam. Kinda like “terrorism” and Iraq. Anyway, he used to be
followed around by the secret police. But at least he could
physically see that he was. Now we should, I guess, just assume
that we are.
The globe has shrunk. I’m typing this on a tatami mat in the heat
of southern Japan during the monsoon season. My truly delightful
MacBookPro is seizing up in the heat and humidity. I’m in a wood
and paper house that predates World War II, yet NTT (the
bureaucratic monopoly phone company) would be happy to come
out here and, for no charge whatsoever, run a fiber optic cable to
my house, so I could have unlimited internet access faster than in
my SF Bay Area house for $60 per month. I could be nicely logged
into the facebook, IM and everything, at speeds faster than in
silicon valley, from the southern tip of Japan. But then I’d never
get this book written.
A quick word about Japan and internet privacy. In Japan, there is
never a doubt that the police will find you. They solve more than
95% of serious crimes, whereas American police are lucky to solve
half. Yesterday the morning news was all about the abduction of
a famous rich doctor’s college student daughter for ransom.
Within half a day, the police had found her in the maze of Tokyo,
and captured her 3 kidnappers. They were Chinese and I guess
they thought they were dealing with the Chinese police. If
74 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
civilization will continue, the world police will become more
Japanese, and democracies will pass Patriot Act after Patriot Act to
empower them. And social networks, search engines, and other
hosted web services, greatly enable police and government
observation and intrusion into your private life, by collecting a
tremendous amount of information about you.
Besides obviously public safety, the Japanese do at least two
things very well. They can cover their entire coastline with large
cement nuggets (which look kinda like jacks, but if you’ve ever
played with jacks, you’re too old to be reading this book) and
pave the waterway of every river with concrete. Alex Kerr explains
that this is because cement companies are politically very well
connected. In America oil companies are very well connected, so
California is having a Sisyphus-like challenge raising CAFE
standards to a level even below China58, much less Europe. The
second thing they do well is take care of Japanese people, like
Facebook will take care of your social life.
Privacy is essential to trust, and trust is essential to use.
Facebook won in the college space because it enabled college
students to interact with their only natural college communities,
and only with those communities. Each college was isolated and
protected from the rest of the internet, sharing a safe private
space. Building on natural, existing communities leverages their
existing feelings of trust among members.
Not only can you be anyone on the internet, you can also be no
one. On myspace.com I’m K. B. “a naked hippie. no a sociopathic
killer” with interests ranging from “yoga, nuclear bombs, farming”
and right down to “the color teal”. And Tom (the founder of
myspace.com, who has 108 million friends today) and I happen to
have the same picture. Tom. (He had it first.) In other words, I
am obviously not myself on myspace.com. On Facebook, I am
about half of one of my real selves.
This is from a Columbia Spectator Staff Editorial on Jan 27, 2006,
which took me a while to find from my saved copy, because it
wasn’t easily googleable. Fortunately, I’d saved a copy with furl.
Right now, anyone with a Columbia e-mail address can
open an account and access a Columbia student’s
profile. This includes administrators, staff, and also
alumni, many of whom now work at firms that recruit
at Columbia.
Karel Baloun 71
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
Facebook is, at its heart, a public forum. The “terms of
use” and “privacy/security” sections of the Web site
make clear that by registering users are, in effect,
publicly releasing all information they enter. This is an
age of limited privacy, and students need to be acutely
aware of this. It is unfortunate but inevitable that
Facebook profiles will have to be more like resumes
than anything else. No one should have to explain to
an employer why they belong to such groups as
“Cocainia” or “I Wanna Get High.”
As far as I can tell, those statements are all accurate. Unless
someone is furling or otherwise saving your profile regularly (and
it only takes one furling or one save-as), you can sweep away
anything bad that’s on your profile, when you get to a point in
your life that it bothers you. Facebook also lets you carefully
tweak your privacy settings and is alert to abuse.
I’ve just read Bebo’s “Online Safety” pages and had a good laugh
at how they pretend to do what they can to keep it safe, by
handing out valuable tips like “your online friends are not like
your real friends” and “don’t tell people where you live”. Taking
their reasonable advice would require a complete change in usage
patterns.56
72 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
56 “Never divulge any personal information that could be used to find or identify
you in real life in a public forum. Password protect this information. This
information includes your real name, address, telephone number, mobile number,
your workplace, health club, or links to websites or other profiles that might give
this information away. It also includes this kind of information about your friends
and family. You may be sharing more information than you intended to by
including a pic with something showing in the photo.”
Kids use myspace to test out various identities, and to get
themselves into trouble whenever they put some real information.
The FBI uses it to catch pedophiles. Otherwise it’s a soft porn site
masquerading as a music site, and I do have to admit that some
of the chicks are quite hot. Go ahead and check it out for that,
but not so much that the FBI get after you.
Huh? Get after me?
Yes, duh. Everyone can know who you are on the internet, unless
you habitually use an anonymizer service57. Your IP address is
assigned by someone who can trace it to your account number,
and your identification information, and they are actually required
to give that to the authorities, and if the request is made under
the Patriot Act, they are actually not allowed to tell you that they
gave your information, or that they were even asked for it. Thank
you my big government friends, for keeping me so safe. Real
thanks Google, for keeping my faith in you alive by trying, alone
among search engines, to stand up to it, while continuing to
create useful features that further erode my privacy.
Karel Baloun 73
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
57 There are dozens of service and software providers in this privacy protection
space. Anonimizer.com sells software. FreeProxy.ru, as ironically we count on
Russians to protect our own privacy, has a list of proxies, as well as other
information. The Tor network provides intellectual heft, while HideMyAss is
instantly useful. Since over 98% of internet users now allow cookies, many
websites, including Facebook, Yahoo, Google and my own, require cookies for
authentication and other critical services, and anonymizers disallow cookies, which
at this time limits their usefulness. A proxy that stores cookies anonymously
seems like a logical next step.
My dad, who grew up behind the iron curtain and escaped
illegally, feels nostalgic these days. Younger readers, think Russia
and the communist menace. Remember? That’s why we did
Vietnam. Kinda like “terrorism” and Iraq. Anyway, he used to be
followed around by the secret police. But at least he could
physically see that he was. Now we should, I guess, just assume
that we are.
The globe has shrunk. I’m typing this on a tatami mat in the heat
of southern Japan during the monsoon season. My truly delightful
MacBookPro is seizing up in the heat and humidity. I’m in a wood
and paper house that predates World War II, yet NTT (the
bureaucratic monopoly phone company) would be happy to come
out here and, for no charge whatsoever, run a fiber optic cable to
my house, so I could have unlimited internet access faster than in
my SF Bay Area house for $60 per month. I could be nicely logged
into the facebook, IM and everything, at speeds faster than in
silicon valley, from the southern tip of Japan. But then I’d never
get this book written.
A quick word about Japan and internet privacy. In Japan, there is
never a doubt that the police will find you. They solve more than
95% of serious crimes, whereas American police are lucky to solve
half. Yesterday the morning news was all about the abduction of
a famous rich doctor’s college student daughter for ransom.
Within half a day, the police had found her in the maze of Tokyo,
and captured her 3 kidnappers. They were Chinese and I guess
they thought they were dealing with the Chinese police. If
74 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
civilization will continue, the world police will become more
Japanese, and democracies will pass Patriot Act after Patriot Act to
empower them. And social networks, search engines, and other
hosted web services, greatly enable police and government
observation and intrusion into your private life, by collecting a
tremendous amount of information about you.
Besides obviously public safety, the Japanese do at least two
things very well. They can cover their entire coastline with large
cement nuggets (which look kinda like jacks, but if you’ve ever
played with jacks, you’re too old to be reading this book) and
pave the waterway of every river with concrete. Alex Kerr explains
that this is because cement companies are politically very well
connected. In America oil companies are very well connected, so
California is having a Sisyphus-like challenge raising CAFE
standards to a level even below China58, much less Europe. The
second thing they do well is take care of Japanese people, like
Facebook will take care of your social life.
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