Nabil Alikhan 40959805 This article draws on the experience of the writer and related literature to make conclusions about trust, privacy and identity in social computing sense. The Background outlines the nature of social websites and describes some of the more prominent ones touching on Twitter, Facebook, Last.FM, Blogger and Delicious. The Focus and Reflection discusses the central thesis of the article regarding how users define their identity on the internet and the implications of sharing their information. The Reflection covers this responding to three questions: 'Digital Identity and Trust; what are we saying about ourselves online?', 'Trusting "friends", is our personal information given in social network sites safe and secure? ' and 'What ever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; do digital identities affect us in the real world?' Social websites are very different from one to the other but all contain four distinct traits; persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences but these concepts are not understood by the general user who fail to realize the information they post into websites is not safe from the scrutiny of from law enforcement, government, employers and potential employers. Social websites are based on a system of trust; in order to facilitate communication between users there needs to be a degree of trust between them. The success of the social website is based on how well they build this trust. Trust is quickly developed from associating another user with a defined point in time and space and knowing this user's position in life, information like geographic location, education, employment, physical appearance and so on. Trust is not developed from knowing information like interests and hobbies. Social websites seem to mimic a social gathering; the difference between the two is that a social gathering is face-to-face interaction and a lot of the information we learn about someone is generated from their tone of voice, their mannerism, their clothing, their physical appearance. This information is lost through the social website medium. In order to compensate, social websites publish lots of other information we wouldn't get when we first meet someone, such as interests and hobbies. Social websites also introduce four new aspects to communication that is not present in face-to-face communication: (Boyd, 2008) There are many social websites available, below are descriptions of some of the more prominent ones: Facebook is the mother of all social networking websites. It provides numerous ways to interact and communicate with other users; through games, photos, messages, comments, quizzes, interests, listing hobbies and interests. Facebook provides groups for likeminded people with a particular issue. It allows users to organize events and integrates other social sites like Twitter, Blogger and Delicious. The amount of literature about Facebook compared to other social sites is amazing. Facebook is the Holy Grail for behavioral scientists everywhere because Facebook facilitates real life interactions and conversation but still maintains the aspects of persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences. Facebook is discussed in detail throughout this article and is cited as the classic example for a social network site. On a personal level, Facebook provides a great way to keep in touch with friends and family. My grandmother who lives overseas (with some assistance) is able to look at recent family photographs. Facebook has a steep learning curve, it does not introduce tools properly and other users have to teach new users how to use the website. There privacy issues about the website, which are discussed in detail in the next section. Twitter revolves around a question, 'What are you doing?'. A user is expected to give a small 140 character message about what they are doing. Users can follow other users and receive updates on what those users are doing. Aside from the input of what a user is doing there is no other real information; there are no picture albums and no contact information about users. Twitter users have changed how Twitter is used. Most users do not write directly what they are doing but post messages about ideas, websites they like and messages to other Twitter users. Twitter is an interesting example of how the users have reshaped the application into something else (Mishaud, 2007). It is amazing how many uses users have found for a simple small message box. Twitter users tend to group into small interconnected circles; these groups are circles of friends who know each other in real life through one way or another. Some of these users have acquaintances and friends outside this circle who have their own group of friends on Twitter. These connections form branches between user clusters, facilitating the mingling of both groups. Twitter is highly popular in the United States and Europe and is relatively unknown in the rest of the world. (Java et al., 2007) On a personal level, Twitter indulgences both my ego and my curiosity. I get to follow what other people are doing and I also get to post up what I'm doing and pretend that it matters. Twitter allowed to learn more about my comp3505 peers and made it easier to approach them when I saw them in lectures and tutorials. Last.FM is based around the music tastes of the user. It sends information about the user's music to the site through a helper program called a scrobbler. It interfaces with iTunes and can also upload music that was listened on an iPod. This way it can form a genuine description of a user's music taste this can be cross-referenced with other users to see compatibility. Users can also see what music events are on and find information about bands. What makes Last.FM so exceptional as opposed to filling in the 'music' section in a blog or using an application in Facebook is the power of the scrobbler and the database behind it. The scrobbler becomes a passive element of someone's computer, it quietly sits in the system tray and monitors the music a user plays, the song and the band is identified through the Last.FM database and it can show the user information relating to the song they're listening to. The information about the song is generated by other users; if no information exists, users are invited to add information, similar to the concept of Wikipedia. Last.FM has become a large compendium of information about bands, music, gigs and music albums, its database also had an array of samples from different tracks to give a user an indication what a band sounds like. A band's albums are cross-referenced with Amazon.com to facilitate purchases. One of the best features of Last.FM is that not only does it show what users are listening to and recommend but the website itself has its own suggestion of what other bands a user might like given the information about all the user's music tastes and listening habits. The site also recommends which concerts a user would be interested in if the user indicates the city in which they live. On a personal level, Last.FM has given me a lot of information about upcoming gigs and allowed me to keep ahead of my friends in that regard. I've also been able to develop a good appreciation of French Ska from the recommendations Last.FM has given me. Blogger is the quintessential weblog provider. It provides users a space to write anything they want, at any length. Blogger does not provide the same level of searchability as the other websites, users are supposed to make contact with other users by reading their blogs and posting comments about it. The method of finding a blog a user might want to read seems to be outside the scope of Blogger. Blogger profiles do not contain a lot of information, presumably because information should be coming from the blog itself. It is very easy to hide one's identity on Blogger so on its own does not seem to have any problems with privacy; it is only when a blog can be cross-referenced with MySpace or Facebook account is it possible to determine who a user is. Blogger contrasts sharply to LiveJournal, which is geared towards building community between users. On a personal level, Blogger taught me how to write proper English, having to formulate ideas and write them in a logical manner, it also taught me how to proofread my own writing, something my English teachers failed to do. Although, I do wish that my personal blog was read a little more, something Blogger has never helped me with. Delicious is bookmarking website, the idea is to amalgamate websites into one single page of links. Delicious seems to have evolved from the ever increasing amount of information on the internet, this way it is possible for a user to collect links to all their favourite website and web content and categorize them with tags for searchability. Other Delicious users can subscribe to a user's Delicious page and be notified if a new link is posted. There is very little information about a Delicious user aside from the websites they link. On a personal level, I couldn't come up with a proper use of Delicious myself, although a lot of my friends link me YouTube and things and this would be an excellent place to put links like that instead. Delicious would be much more powerful if it was linked in with pipes and everyone knew how to use RSS feeds. This article discusses comparing and contrasting the real world to the digital world from the context of social networking sites through investigating concepts of trust, privacy and identity. When the Internet was in its infancy, the emails and messages sent between people were treated with a certain level of distrust. Users could behind screen names in IRC chat rooms and it was impossible to tell the true identity of anyone else. With the web 2.0 phenomena these messages are now sent with profile picture and the messages link back to a profile page with varied information about that person, so the identities we have online now reflect our real world identity. Do our online profiles and digital interactions affect our relationships and identity in the real world? This is the focus point of this article. This article will touch on three questions to best explore the topic: Social websites seem to mimic a social gathering; users are all there to meet other users and mingle, the users who sit in the corner and look at their feet are usually the users who are ignored. A good, complete profile or bio page is the digital equivalent of giving every visitor a big smile, a firm handshake. Users fill information about interests and hobbies because they want to talk to other users about that; even if they write "I don't really like books", they still want another user to talk to them about their apparent dislike of books. Facebook only requires a user to show a display name, an email and the network they are attached to; but users often fill all the fields in their profile. Why do users post this information? Because the entire point of the website for a user is to connect with other similar users. (Acquisti et al., 2006) By posting information about one's self, a user is implicitly saying they want to know about other user's information. The act seems friendly and incites trust. It is deemed friendly and social. One study into Twitter found, Twitter users who update often and follow many users are in turn followed by many other users. (Java et al., 2007) It is clear that a user's activity dictates how popular they are. The desire to be friendly and social to other users forces users to reveal parts of their identity and show they are a real person too. Humans instinctively seek out relationships with other people and establish networks of trust with people around them. The purpose of a social networking site is to facilitate and encourage this behavior. At the moment Facebook is the best social networking site for this reason. It has the most users and has the highest net worth because the site is geared towards eliciting a single human emotion; trust. A person needs to know certain things about a person before they can trust them enough to interact with them. The information a person needs to know about another's identity can be shown by comparing a site like Last.FM with Facebook. Last.FM does not contain information about a user's address or any real reference about their location, nor does it show anything about their career or education, and most profile pictures in Last.FM does not show the user's face. Since none of the associated friends give this information either, it's impossible to pinpoint who someone is. The user's information about what music they listen to is abstracted from the real world because there is no context about the user themselves. We see an aspect of a person's identity purely from the music they listen to. The music information Last.FM lists about a user is genuine; the user does not input the music they listen to, it is taken directly from the media player itself though the scrobbler helper program. The question is: Do we trust them? The answer is no. Facebook on the other hand make the profile picture a prominent part of the page and most profile pictures are the user's face, it is possible to show information about a user's career, education, location, as well as music, books, movies and so on. A friend's list in Facebook shows the all the other Facebook users the user knows along with their information. Again, the question is: Do we trust them? The answer is yes. What is the key element in eliciting trust? These bits of information are the same bits of information we need to identify someone in real life. For instance notice the clarification questions about whether someone would know someone else: The question could be "Do you know Sarah?" which would initiate the following questions: Once we know the answer to some or all of these questions we can say whether we 'know' a person or not. This information is key for us defining someone's identity. Once we have identity we can decide whether we will interact with them as friends and through more interactions we decide whether we associate with them or not. Facebook helps at all stages of this process by displaying information about someone to allow us to give them context. This is one of the reasons why Facebook is so popular today. The previous section discussed the level of trust in social network sites, this section and the next elaborates on how that trust can be abused. One survey found that 77 percent of Facebook users have never read the privacy policy and 67 percent mistakenly believe that Facebook does not collect information about them from other sources, nor does it combine information about them collected from other sources. 56 percent of surveyed users wrongly believe that Facebook does not share personal information with third parties and 76% of respondents said that the information on the Facebook profile is true and complete; when this was cross referenced with their profiles this was found to be the case (Acquisti et al., 2006). Facebook users do not realize that their personal information on display to the world, and they usually give genuine information. Most of social websites are based in the United States and as such are subject to the United States laws regarding privacy, these privacy laws are based around the Fourth Amendment which states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." (Hodge, 2006) Justice Harlan in (Hodge, 2006) recognizes "there is a twofold requirement, first, that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as 'reasonable.'" In the context of Facebook and similar websites, a user posts their information on the website with the intention of it being read by others; with the assumption their audience is the selected group of friends. However, through the nature of Facebook and the vagary of the privacy policy any information users enter are open to scrutiny from law enforcement, government, employers, potential employers and a user's mother. Incidentally, the Fourth Amendment does apply to emails since this communication is between a selected group of users and is sent with the intention of being viewed by those users and those users alone. Since Facebook users usually do not qualify who should see their page and who shouldn't, the information is not protected by the Fourth Amendment and is essentially in the public domain. (Hodge, 2006) There is very little literature regarding privacy for social websites other than Facebook and Myspace. The reasons for this have been discussed in the previous section, 'Digital Identity and Trust; who are we saying we are online?'. Essentially, Facebook contains enough different applications, like photos, friends lists and profile information, in order to cross reference someone's true identity and geographical location. Websites like Twitter and Last.FM have very little input of who a user actually is; most of the users in the Comp3505 on Twitter were unable to identify other Comp3505 Twitter users even though they shared a subject with that person. Facebook carries the most important information about someone's identity and is naturally the website to cause the most privacy concerns. The information users post about themselves in social websites does not exist in a vacuum. There is a growing trend in criminal charges, termination of jobs, and penalties against users who post incriminating evidence about themselves and others. Most Facebook users are apathetic about their own privacy (Acquisti et al., 2006). They openly publish photos, information and comments that does not always portray them in a positive light. Some users even post up information about illegal activities. Here are some summaries of news articles about users being affected by the information they post on websites like Facebook and weblogs: The information users post into websites is not safe from the scrutiny of law enforcement, government, employers and potential employers and most users of these websites are clearly not aware of this. Social websites seem to mimic a social gathering; the difference between the two is that a social gathering is face-to-face interaction and a lot of the information we learn about someone is generated from their tone of voice, their mannerism, their clothing, their physical appearance. This information is lost through the social website medium. In order to compensate, social websites publish lots of other information we wouldn't get when we first meet someone, such as interests and hobbies. Social websites have aspects of persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences that is not present in face-to-face interactions. When the Internet was in its infancy, the emails and messages sent between people were treated with a certain level of distrust. Users could behind screen names in IRC chat rooms and it was impossible to tell the true identity of anyone else. With the web 2.0 phenomena these messages are now sent with profile picture and the messages link back to a profile page with varied information about that person, so the identities we have online now reflect our real world identity. Humans instinctively seek out relationships with other people and establish networks of trust with people around them. The purpose of a social networking site is to facilitate and encourage this behavior. Social websites are based on a system of trust; in order to facilitate communication between users there needs to be a degree of trust between them. The success of the social website how well they build this trust. Trust is quickly developed from associating another user with a defined point in time and space and knowing this user's position in life, information like geographic location, education, employment, physical appearance and so on. Trust is not developed from knowing information like interests and hobbies. Users subconsciously know that they need to give information in order to have other users trust them but they forget that the internet is a public space and this information is available to everyone. Users expect a certain level of discretion with the information they give to social websites and expect their details to be kept private, however, this is not the case. Social websites do not respect that privacy and websites like MySpace and Facebook often shares user's information with third parties. Users are unaware that there is no real legal requirement of privacy on these websites. If they did know it would probably stifle the trust bonds between users and elicit a feeling of distrust towards the website. There are many instance where the information that users have posted on social websites that have been used against them. They were not aware the information was publicly accessible and in some cases have been arrested, fired from their job, deemed unacceptable for potential employment or even submitted to a mental hospital. There is a direct contrast between human's need to be social and a person's need to protect their vital information and this poses a problem for users of social websites everywhere. ACQUISTI, ALESSANDRO & GROSS, R. (2006) Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook. IN GOLLE, P. & DANEZIS, G. (Eds.) Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Cambridge, U.K: Robinson College. URL: http://petworkshop.org/2006/preproc/preproc_03.pdf#search=%22Awareness%2C%20Information%20Sharing%2C%20and%20Privacy%20on%20the%20Facebook%22 Last viewed: 21/3/2008 BOYD, D. (2008) Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. IN BUCKINGHAM, D. (Ed.) Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. URL: http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf Last viewed: 21/3/2008 CZEKAJ, L. (2007) Workers fired over Internet postings. OTTAWA SUN. Ottawa, Canada. URL: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/01/17/3394584-sun.html Last viewed: 21/3/2008 HODGE, M. J. (2006) The Fourth Amendment and privacy issues on the "new" internet: Facebook.com and MySpace.com. Southern Illinois University Law Journal. URL: http://www.law.siu.edu/research/31fallpdf/fourthamendment.pdf Last viewed: 21/3/2008 JAVA, A., SONG, X., FININ, T. & TSENG, B. (2007) Why We Twitter: Understanding the Microblogging Effect in User Intentions and Communities. WebKDD. URL: http://workshops.socialnetworkanalysis.info/websnakdd2007/papers/submission_21.pdf Last viewed: 21/3/2008 KHARIF, O. (2006) Big Brother Is Reading Your Blog. BusinessWeek. URL: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2006/tc20060228_241578.htm MISHAUD, E. (2007) Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self. Department of Media and Communications. London, London School of Economics. URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/mediaWorkingPapers/MScDissertationSeries/Mischaud_final.pdf Last viewed: 21/3/2008 SMITH, K. (2005) NCSU Students Face Underage Drinking Charges Due To Online Photos. WRAL. Raleigh-Durham Fayettervile, N.C. URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20051031084848/http://www.wral.com/news/5204275/detail.html Last viewed: 21/3/2008 STEINER, E. (2007) Facebook, Guns & the Virginia Tech Fallout; SUNY Student Sent to Mental Hospital for Posting Gun Photo. Washinton Post. Washington. URL: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/offbeat/2007/04/facebook_guns_the_virginia_tec_1.html Last viewed: 21/3/2008 Or – Does this profile make my head look big?
Introduction
Background
Facebook
Twitter
Last.FM
Blogger
Delicious
Focus
Reflection
Digital Identity and Trust; who are we saying we are online?
Trusting "friends", is our personal information given in social network sites safe and secure?
What ever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; do digital identities affect us in the real world?
Conclusion
References
Last viewed: 21/3/2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
S40959805: Uploading ourselves digitally; Privacy, trust and identity issues
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10 comments:
WOW...that was a blog and a half...
I could not agree more that a persons online activities, not just in twitter but in the majority of these social networking sites and services, adds to their popularity per se. I know that I have many friends on facebook whom I would not have met if I had not accepted their random app request or responded to them in a game of online poker.
But as you said, in relation to online social services, people feel the need to seek out relationships with others to show that they themselves are real humans, not just a digital imprint.
Good analysis by pointing the differences between face to face socialisation and web based interaction.
They are not as similar as we think when you realise that there are a lot additional features that we don't have in speech.
Certainly, a lot of information is lost when interacting through an electronic medium, and as you said, this has to be compensated by adding features that wouldn't be there in face to face interaction.
With regards to your comments that the users have changed Twitter, I'm not sure that they have. It depends on how you interpret the question What are you doing? If you interpret it physically and only post your specific actions, the service wouldn't be anywhere near as useful socially. E.g. Every second post would be "Sitting in front of my computer, typing". If you interpret the question as encapsulating thoughts, then people use the service exactly as intended.
Just something to think about!
A very interesting read, with lots of fun statistics.
I'm suprised that 23% of people bothered to read the facebook privacy policy. Who has time to read those things? Although I guess if they have time to spend on facebook then they have time for some light reading.
It seems that all it comes down to, is that people don't realise that any information they put on the internet can be used against them. Admittedly some of these people are kids that just don't think about consequences. Still, when will we learn?
@God-king salmon:
Well the public conversations between users with @ and posting urls are definately not about what someone's doing; in the literal sense. I guess you can stretch the word doing, but your right, its boring to just post what your doing. and i think everyone feels teh same way, given the twitter posts.
@skim-milk those statiscs didnt include children in the sample. just users like you and me. i blame the wall-to-wall thing. and the "friends" terminology.
@Erik Estrada; thank you for your support, and chips rocks!
Very professional and interesting reflection, one of the best so far.
epic reflection
"Facebook has a steep learning curve" cant agree more
As peterj said, this is very professional, and is also a very thorough look into some of the different applications, and the traps they provide.
Really great post.
I agree totally with your concerns about privacy. I also liked your comparisons of online and in real life social networking.
Great post. I like your use of statistics and your opinions on Facebook privacy.
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