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Securing Private Data from Network 'Zombies'
Friday, May 9, 2008 | 
Pew Internet Posts
As more of us integrate social networking into our daily lives online, the layered privacy choices we make through our in-network interactions are becoming increasingly complex.
In the process of creating accounts on social networking sites, many users embrace the "fix it and forget it" approach -- either choosing to accept the default privacy settings or making deliberate choices to customize those settings to their own preferences. And while these initial choices might serve us well for some interactions online, the process of managing our privacy preferences on these networks often requires us to have a dynamic, evolving conversation with the applications we use.
Beyond the basic decisions we make about restricting access to our profile through settings, users are faced with a myriad of choices about what we share and who we share it with each time we post new content, add an application, accept a new friend, or join a new group.
As noted in an Associated Press article, "Social Networking Applications Can Pose Security Risks," the implications of these privacy choices are often not fully understood. Of particular interest in the article is the rising popularity of Facebook applications, programs that are designed by third parties to provide added services and games to users.
Every time users agree to start interacting with a new application, they agree to share their names, networks, and lists of friends with the Facebook Platform applications. In addition, those who read the "Platform Application Terms of Use" will see that they also give their consent to share "any information provided by you and visible to you on the Facebook Site, excluding any of your Contact Information."
So, what happens to all of the excess data we routinely entrust to the kind folks who created the "Zombies" application or "What Kind of Dog Would You Be?" Do the Zombies really need to see the photos of my cat to know best how to attack me?
How this information -- which can include things like your birthday, your dating interests, or your photos -- ultimately gets used by these third parties is a bit of a mystery. Clearly, some applications, such as the popular online word game Scrabulous, use basic demographic information to serve up relevant ads while a user engages with the interface.
Yet, as enterprising young researcher Adrienne Felt has shown along with her colleagues at the University of Virginia, developers are often granted access to much more data than they actually need to ensure that the application functions properly.
As Dan Solove points out in a recent post to his Concurring Opinions blog, even the most conservative users who refuse to add any applications to their profiles still end up sharing many of those same details with third parties via their friends. (The default settings on Facebook permit the sharing of profile information with applications your friends choose to add.)
CNET writer Chris Soghoian emphasizes the challenge this presents to users: "To restate -- if you set your profile to private, and one of your friends adds an application, most of your profile information that is visible to your friend is also available to the application developer -- even if you yourself have not installed the application."
Fortunately, the user can easily change these default settings with a few clicks. But those who are sensitive about the information they share may be surprised to find that their friends have inadvertently disclosed their personal details to third parties -- especially if it turns out that they're also Zombies.
This post also appears on the Thinkernet Forum here.
For recent related research from the Pew Internet Project, see:
"Digital Footprints: Online Identity Management and Search in the Age of Transparency"
Posted by Mary Madden at 12:25 PM | Link to This Entry
Participatory Medicine
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
My speech at a conference on Consumer Connectivity & Web Empowerment gave me the opportunity to quote this excellent Clay Shirky post:
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."As we reach saturation point in internet and cell-phone adoption and basic activities of daily life port online, it seems that more and more people are asking why they can't email their doctors, use mobile health gadgets, and be their own best advocates. To paraphrase, health care that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Health care reform is too big for most people to grasp, but participatory medicine is not.Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
Posted by Susannah Fox at 8:46 AM | Link to This Entry
Talking about teens, writing and technology on NPR
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
Last week, the Pew Internet Project in conjunction with our research partners at the National Commission on Writing (an initiative of the College Board), released a report titled Writing, Technology and Teens that looks at the impact of technology across the social and academic writing of teens.
Today, Richard Sterling, the chair of the National Writing Commission's Board, and I were guests on the Tech Tuesday edition of the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a Washington, DC based radio program produced out of a local NPR affiliate, WAMU. On the show, Richard and I had the opportunity to expand on many of the findings of the report and connect them to broader concerns about education and writing today. To listen to the show, download the audio file on the show's webpage on the WAMU site.
Posted by Amanda Lenhart at 14:42 PM | Link to This Entry
What is the roll [sic] of traditional righting [sic] and grammar in the digital age?
Friday, April 25, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
Of all the figures in our recently released report on teens and writing, none has captured the imagination of the media quite like the finding that the conventions of electronic communication are filtering into the writing that teens do for school. We found that nearly two-thirds of teens admit to using some form of informal text in their school writing: half use non-standard punctuation and capitalization, four in ten have used text shortcuts (such as "LOL"), and one quarter have used emoticons.
Given the concerns that this has raised about the future of writing, it's worth stopping for a moment to note that this trend is hardly limited to teens who take notes with one hand while texting their friends with another. As Garance Franke-Ruta notes in this insightful post, the growth of the blogosphere has created an entire journalistic universe of lightly-edited text in which traditional grammar and punctuation are less important than substantive content or exposure to new and interesting information.
To use one example, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds' influential instapundit blog consists almost entirely of links to interesting articles along with fragmentary bits of analysis (a typical post may consist of nothing more than a link plus a comment such as "Heh" or "Indeed"). And as traditional journalistic ventures such as the Atlantic Monthly or the Economist have jumped into the blogospheric fray, the lines between the two modes of writing have blurred substantially. Franke-Ruta's post was inspired by her friend and Atlantic blogger Matthew Yglesias, who is one of the most insightful young journalists out there today--as well as a serial grammatical offender with an illustrious history of mis-spellings, inappropriate homonyms and bizarre punctuation.
Franke-Ruta predicts that we are entering a world in which meaning is more important than form, and where writers are judged more on the content of their arguments than on their pristine spelling. This is not to argue that traditional spelling and grammar have no use, or that we shouldn't bother teaching teenagers basic rules for writing. But in thinking about how technology and writing interact with each other, it bears remembering that language has always been fluid and evolving, and that the rules of written speech have always been highly dependent on the tools people use to compose their thoughts. And frankly, I'm personally willing to sacrifice a comma here or there for writing that is engaging, thought provoking and that expands my intellectual horizons.
Posted by Aaron Smith at 15:35 PM | Link to This Entry
Are You Impatient for Doctor-Patient Email?
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
Alicia Chang's story on doctor-patient email has generated quite a bit of coverage and comment across the Web.
I'm quoted as saying that "[p]eople are able to file their taxes online, buy and sell household goods, and manage their financial accounts. The health care industry seems to be lagging behind other industries." Here is a link to our internet activities chart, which shows just how popular those "homework" activities are with the 75% of American adults who go online.
Secure email is just one facet of e-health, of course. For more discussion of technology's role in health care, check out these recent essays posted on some influential blogs:
Ending Secrecy: Physician Makes Case for Full Disclosure of Health Records
Millennial Health Care Delivery
Mobile Health Stuff, Available Now
Can We Trust Google With Our Medical Records?
Posted by Susannah Fox at 9:01 AM | Link to This Entry
State-by-State Internet Usage
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
While doing some other research yesterday, I discovered that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently released new state-by-state home internet usage figures based on the Census Bureau's October 2007 Current Population Survey. Judging by my inbox there is a huge amount of interest in this topic, and the NTIA report is a great, up-to-date resource for people who want to know how their state stacks up with the rest of the country.
Posted by Aaron Smith at 9:21 AM | Link to This Entry
Health Care Consumerism
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions released a very interesting report on "Health Care Consumerism" which looks at five "zones" of activity: traditional health services, self-directed care, alternative and non-conventional health services, financing, and information seeking.
I recommend checking out their report for a few reasons:
1) Many of their findings ring true to me. For example:
Myth: Consumers trust their doctor to make decisions for them.
Reality: The majority of consumers want to share decision-making with their doctor; only 20% are content to let their doctor control those decisions unilaterally.
Myth: Consumers are afraid to use the Internet for clinical transactions in health care, fearing loss of privacy and security.
Reality: Consumers are comfortable using the Internet to exchange clinical information with their doctor, especially if it results in better coordination of care and improved service. (They believe their doctors should make greater use of the Internet to provide access to medical records, test results and other types of information.
2) Deloitte Consulting is a big player in this field and they are (or should be) tuned in to discussions about participatory medicine.
3) We should get used to seeing online surveys cited widely, despite their drawbacks.
I'm going to spend some time comparing their health consumer typology (24% of consumers are "Sick & Savvy" and 8% are "Online & Onboard") with the Pew Internet Project's communications technology typology. I wish they had a quiz so we could all identify where we fit!
Comments are welcome at e-patients.net.
Posted by Susannah Fox at 9:12 AM | Link to This Entry
Libraries Solve Problems
Monday, April 14, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
We joined with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois-Ubrana-Champaign to look at the way people search for information to help them solve some basic problems. This presentation covers the highlights from the report issued late last year about library use and the experiences people had at libraries when they went there for problem-solving help.
Posted by Lee Rainie at 11:53 AM | Link to This Entry
Keeping tabs on our Google twins
Friday, April 11, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
A recent New York Times article suggests another reason why people are motivated to search for content connected to their names online: to check up on how their "Google twins" are doing from time to time.
The article points to a psychological theory which suggests that we are drawn to things that remind us of ourselves; in particular, we have a special affinity for the letters in our own names. We feel somehow connected to those who share our name—even if we have never met those on the other side of our search results.
However, it's also the case that we may come to follow our Google twins' footprints online out of a desire to prevent confusion in our lives. In an online survey conducted in conjunction with our "Digital Footprints" report, we asked:
"Have you ever been confused with someone else because of information that was posted online? If so, please tell us about that experience…"
In the open-ended responses that followed, respondents shared a wide array of anecdotes—ranging from incidents that were humorous to those that became quite annoying.
Below are a few highlights:
"Friends have thought that bad poetry written by someone with my name was actually written by me."
"There is another person online with my name, and most of her information is related to her participation in the sport of hot air ballooning. My fiance's family Googled me and they thought that was me!"
"It has happened numerous times. The most egregious series of incidents involved that other person's jilted lover phoning me in the middle of the night, once every six months or so over several years, thinking that I was him."
In an age when it's becoming increasingly important to communicate who we are to others online, perhaps it will become equally important to communicate who we are not.
As an example, see emerging applications like Claim ID that offer innovative ways to manage the content we want to be associated with our names online.
Posted by Mary Madden at 10:24 AM | Link to This Entry
Team China
Monday, April 7, 2008 | Pew Internet Posts
The China Daily, China's largest state-run English language newspaper, led with a front page article on April 5, titled "People 'sign up' to slam media bias" and subtitled "Website attracts 1 m 'signatures' of those angry at West's unfair reports."
The first two paragraphs read:
A Chinese website is appealing to people around the world to "sign up" for its protest against alleged Western media bias in their coverage of last month's riots in Lhasa.
The site, which can be accessed via news portal Sina.com, appeared on Friday, and at press time had garnered more than 1.14 million signatures, most of which came from people on the mainland.
This is another example of how Chinese newspapers, websites, and internet users react in harmony and rally on many issues, as described in this Pew Internet Project report.
Posted by Deborah Fallows at 9:30 AM | Link to This Entry
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