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.

[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?

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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).