Posted by violette on July 25, 2010, at 10:54:50
In reply to The Web Means the End of Forgetting--NYTimes art., posted by zenhussy on July 25, 2010, at 1:05:33
Thanks for the article-that was interesting. I really feel for anyone who'd lose a job over a Facebook photo. Even if someday it is determined to be a violation of civil rights, employers could still discriminate based on what they find as they can now easily discriminate against age, sex, etc. and just say they didn't hire you for other reasons...
Besides that, there are ways to determine who you are even when you use an anonymous name or avatar, and this isn't the only example:
"Ohm became interested in this problem in the course of researching the ease with which we can learn the identities of people from supposedly anonymous personal data like movie preferences and health information...researchers were able to identify people in the database by name with a high degree of accuracy if they knew even only a little bit about their movie-watching preferences, obtained from public data posted on other ratings sites."
There were some intersting solutions suggested in the article. What wasn't mentioned: a future version of Microsoft IE that allows you to somehow delete any content that appears online that had originated from your IP address. That wouldn't prevent stuff redistributed by others-like what happens on this site, but it would be helpful if it is possible to do. I honestly can't stand the idea of a person having to hire a lawyer to sue someone, pay a reputation defender company, or go through some ridiculous process to have one sentence removed.
Some social networks/websites reveal information you thought was private in a sneaky way by implementing a new feature-and making the default settings expose the information where you have to 'opt out' instead of 'opting in':
"Concern about these developments has intensified this year, as Facebook took steps to make the digital profiles of its users generally more public than private. Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private including every users friends, relationship status and family relations would become public and accessible to other users. Then in April, Facebook introduced an interactive system called Open Graph that can share your profile information and friends with the Facebook partner sites you visit."
"What followed was an avalanche of criticism from users, privacy regulators and advocates around the world. Four Democratic senators Charles Schumer of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al Franken of Minnesota wrote to the chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, expressing concern about the instant personalization feature and the new privacy settings. The reaction to Facebooks changes was such that when four N.Y.U. students announced plans in April to build a free social-networking site called Diaspora, which wouldnt compel users to compromise their privacy, they raised more than $20,000 from more than 700 backers in a matter of weeks. In May, Facebook responded to all the criticism by introducing a new set of privacy controls that the company said would make it easier for users to understand what kind of information they were sharing in various contexts."
There are other incidents-like Yahoo automatically sharing contacts that were once private. I do think that as people start to become more aware of the consequences of these things, the markets will adapt-people will choose to use or not use certain companies, such as Google or Yahoo if they don't change their methods as other sites are being created to draw in the market segment of those who are uncomfortable with things like this.
I am certainly not the only one who feels this way:
"A University of California, Berkeley, study released in April found that large majorities of people between 18 and 22 said there should be laws that require Web sites to delete all stored information about individuals (88 percent) and that give people the right to know all the information Web sites know about them (62 percent) percentages that mirrored the privacy views of older adults. A recent Pew study found that 18-to-29-year-olds are actually more concerned about their online profiles than older people are, vigilantly deleting unwanted posts, removing their names from tagged photos and censoring themselves as they share personal information, because they are coming to understand the dangers of oversharing."
It's discouraging to think the answer is to choose not to use internet features and tools. Who wants to be isolated from using social networks or forums? It would certainly be ideal if people could learn to be less judgemental, but what are the chances of that happening in the near or distant future? We've been fighting for peace and human rights for decades, and should keep trying. But could use some help as far as privacy regulations....until then, I suppose people will migrate to websites that address privacy concerns as they are already doing so.
"As people continue to experience the drawbacks of living in a world that never forgets, they may well learn to hesitate before posting information, with or without humanoid Clippys."
It would be helpful for websites to partner with people to incentize people to use them as they are intended.
Now this is interesting:
"Personality impressions based on the online profiles were most accurate for extroverted people and least accurate for neurotic people, who cling tenaciously to an idealized self-image.)"
This is ideal, but will it ever become reality?
"We need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever."
If I was in charge of a human resources dept. (which I will never be) I would not want to search out people's Facebook profiles and such when making hiring decisions. Those sources of information were never needed in the past to make good hiring choices, snd don't seem necessary. Someone with a drunken, sloppy photo might turn out to be the best employee.
"Research in behavioral psychology confirms that people pay more attention to bad rather than good information, and Acquisti says he fears that 20 years from now, if all of us have a skeleton on Facebook, people may not discount it because it was an error in our youth.I like technology discussions in the context of sociology, thanks.
poster:violette
thread:955800
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20100714/msgs/955828.html