My starting position is that the education system is encouraging the Social Media Generation (SMG) to think about their digital footprints – Halleluja!   I agree with the principal that you should make ‘people’ aware that what their write about themselves can come back to haunt them.  Indeed, further, what they say about others may be an indication of their professionalism.   However, following a round table, it is also evident that what the SMG have done is created ‘virtual identies’  There is one, the public facebook which looks like they have never done anything exciting or broken any health and safety law (basically rather dull and duitiful), and then the series of private worlds where they use nick names to share the reality of their shared lives.

Therefore, the employer can now see a perfect digital history, which has been created for them, meaning that as an employer your online check is now as good as reviewing a CV.  You know it is beefed up, indeed Mr Employer did you know that I can now buy virtual (facebook) friends who make me look good (rock on Chinese entrepreneurs)

The SMG are extended their use of virtual identities further to their address books on digital devices (mobile phone)  The names of friends have changed from the shorted first name or the nick name you cannot loose to esoteric names such as “Master Frog” and “Mrs Smith”  enabling them to hide conversations and identity from their friends and others (especially parents)  Indeed it appears that some don’t tell the real person who or what they are called in their address book, so hiding identities if your phone is stolen or borrowed.

So are we encouraging the Social Media Generation to lie and hide now that they know that they can be tracked?

Guest blog from Ajit Jaokar.   Original post is here

Overview

The many privacy related issues raised by the Web will be amplified in the world of mobility and even more so, in a world dominated by sensor networks. Current thinking seems to converge on one important conclusion: through the combined interaction of law, technology and Internet literacy, people should be in a position to control how their own personal information is made available and used for commercial (or other) purposes.

In this post, we explore the feasibility of users managing their own data. i.e. if we indeed want users to manage their own data, what are the issues involved in making this happen? We also look at an alternative i.e. allowing devices to mirror social privacy norms. Hence, I see the discussion as ‘Changing user behaviour to incorporate new device functionality’ OR ‘Changing device behaviour to mirror privacy expectations in human interactions

Privacy and management of data – A background

Today Facebook has become the lightning rod for privacy and they continue to push the issue with new products like “check ins” where facebook allows others to “tag” or check you in at a location, provided you are Facebook friends. Predictably, this has drawn fire from organizations like the ACLU – American Civil Liberties Union when they say Facebook Places: Check This Out Before You Check In. And we see new products and services that are launched to protect user privacy. For example The Fridge aims to be a service that shares content with a group i.e. if you belong to a group everyone can see it. You don’t have to ‘friend’ everyone and by the same token, no one outside the group can see it. Cataphora’s freeware “Digital Mirror” helps to gain an understanding of what we might look like to other people online.

The complexity and benefits of social networking data

Discussions about Privacy generate a lot of ‘heat but little light’. The concerns of data management are known and everyone has a view on it. Everyone wants to be protected and most people have a perception of being ‘exploited’ by companies. But social network data is complex. Noted security expert Bruce Schneier recently published a revised taxonomy of social networking data. It can be summarized as:

• Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.

• Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

• Entrusted data is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data once you post it — another user does.

• Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over it, and you didn’t create it in the first place.

• Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.

• Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you’re likely gay yourself.

There are other ways in which data benefits society. 10 ways data is changing how we live lists the benefits as: Shopping, Relationships(dating), Business deliveries(ex courier services), Maps, Education(schools), Politics(openlylocal), Society (social and spatial relationships through location data), War (wikileaks), Advertising, Linked data and the future.

And I have also said before in the The fallacy of the Better mousetrap: Privacy advocates want to have their cake and eat it too you can’t have it both ways! i.e. publish your content/data and then ask for a share of profits! The future is likely to get more complex in a world dominated by mobility and sensor networks as I point out in The Silence of the chips

Changing User behaviour v.s. Changing device behaviour

How realistic is the idea of people maintaining their own data? i.e. changing user behaviour?

This sounds very seductive until you realize

a) That there is an extra step (inertia) to overcome in managing my data. This will be in multiple sites (facebook, MySpace etc)

b) Much of the data about me is not owned by me (ex comments about me created by other people)

c) The real concern often is metadata i.e. data insights derived by a site based on collective analysis of multiple people which is then retrospectively applied to individuals. Data is owned by individuals, metadata is owned by the site

d) In a world of Mobility and sensor networks (see silence of the chips above), the ability to individually permit or deny sensors to monitor information about people is probably unfeasible. What are the implications in that case?

The option is for us to maintain our behaviour but to have devices change according to society’s privacy norms

Danah Boyd raises an important point when she says that: Privacy Is Not Dead – The way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life. The reason for this disconnect is that in a computational world, privacy is often implemented through access control. Yet privacy is not simply about controlling access. It’s about understanding a social context, having a sense of how our information is passed around by others, and sharing accordingly. As social media mature, we must rethink how we encode privacy into our systems.

And Instead of forcing users to do that, why not make our social software support the way we naturally handle privacy?

Thus the question for me is: Is it realistic to expect users to take responsibility for their own data? OR should we make our social software support the way we naturally handle privacy? So, should we focus of changing behaviour of people OR changing behaviour of devices? The privacy concerns we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg and I think this question would apply more to mobile and sensor data going forward.

I realise of course that this could be a false dichotomy but I feel that if we spent more efforts on making our devices mirror social norms of privacy, we could have a greater chance of success rather than changing the behaviour of people.

From CEO to employee with an opinion, we all share at least a slight intrigue about how much someone can find out about us from the web.  Further, we have become aware that our initial personal and/or company brand/ reputation is often determined by what someone else can find out from the web prior to meeting or buying. Given these views, here are a few guides lines for a quick digital footprint audit and "how to" find out what the web "may share" about you and or your company. 

In the good old days there was the phone book.  A list of all phone numbers in your area.  You could flick through this open, public record and find out where someone lived and their phone number.  Easy, simple and in black and white delivered to your door.

Back in 2006 when Ajit Jaokar and I wrote "Mobile Web 2.0" we created an idea about "I am a tag and not a number" - which was to become a bedrock of PhoneBook 2.0 thinking.  The thinking was that phone books will die as the phone number is dead; you will become what others tag you as.  This move would allow phonebooks to move on from a disconnected phone number and become an connected action and activity delivering: book a meeting, message, call, IM, find and locate,

In the old model you trusted the company who printed the phone book to remove (in the next addition) your details if you so wanted.  However, once printed there was always a copy at the library if you wanted older versions to see if someone had just gone x-directory.

Yes there was a lot of work involved, you had to find the directory, pick it up, use your brain to determine where "F" "I" "S" "H" was in the alphabet, run your finger down the page and horror, write down the number, before you walked to a phone and dialled in the number.

But, however you look at it, this was a public record and was open. So why is there so much concern about web directories.  Yes it is easier to find and any lazy fool can do it from anywhere, but so what?

Is it that we now don't know who to turn to become x-directory (there are too many) or is it that we cannot delete what is there or is it that we are worried about someone else other than a trusted party publishing our data.

In the old printed world there was a sense of control, redress and trust, in the new on-line world we only control what we say we say about ourselves, but cannot control and have little ability to redress what others say about us, or someone providing data that we want, for whatever reason, to keep from open and public scrutiny.

Did our forefathers think, debate, wrestle about the implications of printing every phone number is an open and public book, or was it a useful utility?

one of the joys of the android phone and some other services is "voice search"

Applications are as obvious as:

- sitting in the kitchen needing to convert lbs to Kg, hands are dirty, but you can use voice search to find out

- driving along and needing to find directions or a phone number

- leaving a voice reminder to do some action later

However, would you feel the same about this (voice oriented) data and the search results being added to your digital footprint as one you typed in.  I am starting to explore why we feel differently about our voice conversations than typed data.   If adverting appeared for a kitchen scale conversion on your TV after your searched would you mind?

All views welcome.

Don’t forget to do a factory reset before you pass it on – or you will compromise your identity, privacy, security, reputation ……

Changing name may be only way to escape previous online activity reports Carrie-Ann Skinner of PC Advisor

“Young web users may be need to change their names when they become adults in a bid to distance themselves from content previously posted online about them” Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." "I mean we really have to think about these things as a society. I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things."

Schmidt also told the newspaper the search engine is "trying to figure out what the future of search is".

"I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type."

He says that at present "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are". The search engine also knows your location, which according to the WSJ, means if you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk.

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

However, social media consultant Suw Charman-Anderson told the BBC, the problem was not as great as Schmidt believes. "There's always a lag between the introduction of new technology and the development of a set of social norms around the behaviour that the technology encourages."

She said the idea that everything is stored online is not true and it will be quite some time before that can become true "because of the enormity of the internet".

"As a society, we are just going have to become a bit more forgiving of the follies of youth."

However, many women are now considering keeping their maiden names rather that changing to their husbands to maintain their professional digital reputation, I suppose it all depends what you need to hide !

This is an article from Treeworld on August 21, 2010.   There are many Tony Fish’s and shows how someone could associate this one with me and think that I have a new job.  Learning - always take care to check that the name is the person you really want.

AN ENVIRONMENTAL expert has agreed to 16 months of koala community service after giving a developer advice that was so deficient a local council says it caused the deaths of 30 breeding females.

After pleading guilty in the first prosecution of an adviser to a developer, Tony Fish and his company Orogen Pty Ltd have agreed to provide $160,000 worth of environmental services to preserve koala communities by mapping their habitat for Port Stephens Council. The order to help protect koalas, known as an environmental service order, is on top of $120,000 in fines and legal costs and an order that Mr Fish and his company serve a modern-day equivalent of a stint in the stocks by publishing details of their offence in the Herald and the newsletter for the Ecological Consultants Association.

Under the headline ''Environmental consultant convicted of causing damage to koala habitat at Taylors Beach, Port Stephens'', the advertisements say Orogen and Mr Fish provided a developer with advice on what vegetation could be lawfully cleared on the property, but failed to advise that damaging the habitat of the koala was unlawful under the National Park and Wildlife Act.

''Both Orogen and Mr Fish were aware that the property contained habitat of the koala and koala movement corridors. Vegetation containing koala habitat was subsequently cleared.''

Mr Fish told the court that because of an oversight he failed to advise the owner of the land, Buildev, that it was illegal to damage threatened species habitat without a development consent from council, which saw more than three hectares of the 30-hectare site being unlawfully cleared in 2007.

Justice Nicola Pain said there was "no evidence before the court of any physical harm to the koalas as a result of the clearing activity".

But Lee McElroy, a vegetation officer with the Port Stephens Council, said he had no doubt that felling the trees caused the deaths of koalas which, he said, ''panic if they don't find the trees they have previously visited''.

"They remember if they passed a tree on the left or right side and they get confused and scared if the trees they climb are gone and they run across the road,'' he said.

"We lost 30 breeding females straight after the clearing event. That's a large breeding colony that has been virtually wiped out from one incident … It's not anecdotal evidence, they were using it [the cleared area] as a corridor and they ran across the road when they discovered the trees they knew and expected to use had been removed."

While admitting he had made a ''significant'' mistake, Mr Fish denied the clearing was responsible for the deaths.

"There is no evidence the clearing activity had caused any harm to the koalas," he said.

Mr Fish said he and the company he part-owns were "sorry for it" and had decided "to learn from it, to grow from it and to contribute to the industry from it".

Lisa Corbyn, who heads the Department of Environment which prosecuted Mr Fish, said the decision put environment consultants on notice they "have an important responsibility to provide accurate advice" to clients.

Mr McElroy agreed the decision was a ''very valuable lesson'' for environmental consultants.

"We come across this all the time where we have so-called consultants giving advice contrary to the legislation,'' he said. ''While there were good environmental consultants there were also bad apples who would simply tell developers what they wanted to hear. "There are ecologists trying to please developers knowing they'll get further work with them."

Today we are concerned in some ways by the thought that CCTV can capture our actions and the issues about our privacy.  This is balanced with the comfort that so are others and those who have nothing to hide are safe.  Data (video) is kept in the promise that at some point it could be used to protect you, and conversely used to capture you, when the algorithms become sufficiently good to interrupt actions, I hope never intent.

Today, in the most part, the CCTV system cannot link the image of you to an identity of you.  When this link is established could it be used to make your personal data more secure?  If you lost your phone, image the local CCTV network acknowledging that it is not you holding your phone and locks the device up, or indeed starts to track it.

Would such data (systems linking images to identity) be of use, or are the benefits outweighed by the possible downsides?