LJ, Privacy and How Code Can Help

[green_amber]

One of the reasons why most people I know on LJ, like LJ, is that you can distinguish between your public posts, your Friends posts and your custom posts. I understand most the MySpace type sites, usually aimed at younger audiences, don't support this well; I did find some functions like this when i looked at Facebook but I also understand they were added, not a built in part of the original functionality. And I believe Orkut had a bit of a scandal where they disclosed personal data?

Do any of you use other social spaces that have privacy-control akin to LJ? At one conference, I heard that on Tribe you HAVE to put up a picture of yourself to use it - that's also interesting info (of the opposite kind, natch!)

Getting more geeky, do any of you use a particular search engine, email client, browser, etc. because it gives you more privacy or more control over your personal information? eg does Mozilla /Firefox have advantages over IE in this department? I DON'T really mean general security here - except in the closely defined sense of "stops people bugging/surveilling me".

A quote from Cory to give you the idea..

"If you're a phone company, don't keep logs. …If you're a search company, abandon your cookies. Find the liberty that your competition is too timid to bring to its customers and build it in. And then tell your customers about it: BobNet: the ISP that won't rat you out! PriyaCrawler: a search engine that doesn't log you! Once your customers get wind of the fact that all the features they've dreamt of are possible, cheap, and on offer in the high street, you'll find yourself in a category all your own.”


(Admiss/claimer : yes this is for a paper I'm writing and yes, i could do with the help!! M)

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I use Firefox partly because it stops pop ups which might be used for user tracking purposes. However IE may do this now as well.

I also use it because it is unlikely to ever tell Microsoft what I am viewing - but that is probably paranoia rather than a reasoned strategy.

I am happy about use of cookies *on a single site*. I only see a privacy problem where they are used on multiple sites - eg by advertisers.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

AS far as I know IE is fine for the first and last now - I have a pop up blocker that works fine on IE and I think the new IE XP SP (6?) stopped third party cokies - tho maybe someone more technoliterate can confirm.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons most people I know on LJ, like LJ, is that you can distinguish between your public posts, your Friends posts and your custom posts.

For those of us with an academic / political / civil service footprint, it's pretty much a deal breaker.

At one conference, I heard that on Tribe you HAVE to put up a picture of yourself to use it

Weird - but how would they know it was you?

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Well, exactly.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Flickr allows me to distinguish between photos visible to everyone, or to friends, family or both. You can define your contacts as friends, family, both or neither, but there's no scope for creating your own custom groups.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Yes, Flickr seems q like LJ - (which came first?)

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Flickr was December 2003, LJ was March 1999.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Wowe, I wish you were my research assistant!

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Not quite. Fliockr's security is only at an index level. So, if you know the picture URI anyone can see it - so there's nothing to stop someone "leaking" supposedly private images.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Ah, I had assumed it was working by blocking access to the images, I didn't realise it was only blocking the index. I'll be a lot more wary of using it for images I don't want public on the internet, then.

[andrewducker]

One of the things Google does, that I like, is track my searches. I can go back and look at my history if I want to, which I've found extremely useful a few times.

Calling all websites - track me, work out what I want and then give it to me before I ask!

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Yes I have your type in the paper too!

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

actually I've just quoted you ! anonymously of course.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

ps I want a pop up blocker that blocks that icon :P

[andrewducker]

See - if you had Firefox then you could use NukeAnything or AdBlock to tell it you never wanted to see that image.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

That almost makes it worth switching!

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the latest Opera allows blocking that specific image too.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I have to disagree with Cory here.

He doesn't seem to have any idea how telcos run their billing systems. They need to keep logs to (a) feed switch information to billing systems (especially when running multiple switch platforms - I knew a telco that could only bill by burning a CSV of its switch logs to CD and feeding those into the billing systems) and (b) to reconcile cross-network traffic.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Libraries have to track circulation. What they do now under the PATRIOT act is they toss the record when the book is returned. PhoneCo accounting systems of course are going to move much more slowly than librarians. But they could do something if the PhoneCo execs decided it was important enough. Those CDs can be shredded after the bills go out.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

AS I understand it , this is what the whole data retention directive fuss here is about. the telco busines model is scrub logs once bills have gone out and not needed for complaints/q of service checks, ie pretty soon - plus far less logs kept now flat bandwidth in many cases. data retention model wants people to sit on this stuff for months, years, at own expense, so govt can hypothetically ask for it.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Yes, I meant to mention that I am totally in favor of bringing US data retention policy up to the EU standards.

[ripperlyn.livejournal.com]

That seems slightly extreme to me - what about those occasions upon which the telecom fucks up a billing and the person needs to ring back to sort it? It'd be nice if they could keep the data for like, a few weeks past the bill's due date, just to make sure the person wasn't going to need it anyway...

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

It might be worth following Drew Benvie's survey of the 5 most popular social media tools among well known bloggers and the technical press...

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I found that on your LJ already, ta!

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Cory's recommendation could work for phone companies and ISPs because they traditionally charge for services. Any media that is advertising-supported really wants to track us, because we're the product being served to their customers, the advertisers. Google's AdWords was a clever way around the problem, but they are now amassing ever more information about their users. I think US consumers are way too used to being tracked, data-mined and spammed by their banks and every business they shop with. This makes it seem okay to build the same regime on the internets. It's not okay.

In answer to your question, I use FireFox with Java and scripting turned off, cookies turned off, and history automatically cleared on exit, whenever I want to visit a site I don't trust. Currently I am emulating (ok, being) a normal naive trusting user and running a stock browser with a default configuration. But at least it's Safari on a Mac.

I don't use friends-locking of posts on LJ because I can't be bothered and I'm not going to post anything where it could turn out to be a career-limiting-move. That means you don't get my really good rants, but sorry, and I'm sure you understand.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

The commercial/ad revenue disticnctio is v interesting - I myust get that in!
I think what Cory was partly suggesting was that instead of people paying for features like extra speed, they might pay for privacy as a feature if informed enough.

[ripperlyn.livejournal.com]

It may be unfounded, but I've avoided the move to gmail because of the privacy issue rumours that surrounded its rolling-out.

[trav28.livejournal.com]

I believe there is no "privacy" with digital/internet technology. It's easily replicated hence it's always a risk. HEnce, I never put anything out here I wouldn't want leaked into the "public sphere" (habermaas).