privacy

Alice Marwick and I co-authored this piece for The Guardian.

The Press Complaints Commission in the UK has now ruled that there is no “reasonable expectation” of privacy on Twitter.

People will be bored of what you are doing. By knowing more about you they may like you less. You are advertising when your house is empty to rob. And you are making it easy for paeodophiles to track you down. These are the charges leveled against Facebook Places in a piece in this weekend’s Sunday Times (no article link I’m afraid – behind the paywall!).

The book that I’m writing is focused on myths that we have about teens and social media. I’m trying to find some good quotes from news media that perpetuate these myths and I’m hoping that you might be able to help. The more salacious and outraged, the better.  I’m looking for articles in mainstream venues that talk about all of the reasons in which social media is bad, bad, bad.  What are your favorite news articles that reinforce these widespread beliefs?

[Posted originally to the Digital Media & Learning blog.]

Carmen and her mother are close. As far as Carmen’s concerned, she has nothing to hide from her mother so she’s happy to have her mom as her ‘friend’ on Facebook. Of course, Carmen’s mom doesn’t always understand the social protocols on Facebook and Carmen sometimes gets frustrated. She hates that her mom comments on nearly every post, because it “scares everyone away…Everyone kind of disappears after the mom post…It’s just uncool having your mom all over your wall. That’s just lame.”

Eszter Hargittai and I just published a new article in First Monday entitled: “Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?”

Facebook today announced new features to address the criticism that is has faced recently for its privacy settings and processes. In December 2009 and then again in April this year, the site made a number of changes to its privacy options and settings. In essence they opened up more data to users beyond your friends and immediate networks and changed some of the default settings. This led to the situation where users had 50 different settings and 170 options to control the levels of access to and sharing of the data and information on their profiles.