Digital ID Coach

As 2010 winds to a close, we came across great advice for kickin’ out the old apps on Facebook, and why you should do so. “The developers of these older applications required you to hand over your entire digital identity, and often have access to all of your personal data–including things like marital status, personal photos and videos,” says author Vanessa Dennis. From Delete Older Facebook Apps — or Risk Everyone’s Privacy, Ms. Dennis points out that:

In 2009, Facebook made several highly publicized privacy changes as part of a settlement with the Canadian government. This means newer apps offer much more privacy control for the user.

So in addition to monitoring your profile privacy settings on Facebook, you should also consider deleting older apps and installing newer versions. Here is an example of the data access from an older YouTube app and then the newer YouTube app. Much less personal information is available, and much less is required for the app to work.

The author includes five clear, illustrated steps for checking on your apps and making changes. Now at the end of this calendar year, a little housecleaning seems in order.

Best wishes for an informationally aware New Year and beyond!

We see Facebook “Like” buttons everywhere. They’re a common token of popularity: if you “like” someone or something, you’re connected in some direct-through-Facebook digital way. In Facebook’s ‘Like This’ button is tracking you (Whether you click it or not), author Stewart Meagher reports that Dutch researcher Arnold Roosendaal “warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not.”

“However, when a site is visited which includes Facebook Connect, this application issues a cookie. From that moment on, visits to other websites which display the ‘Like’ button result in a request for the Like button from the Facebook server including the cookie.”

Which means Facebook has swiped another batch of valuable data without asking for permission.

“Based on the cookie, the entire web behaviour of an individual user can be followed,” says Roosendaal. “Every site that includes some kind of Facebook content will initiate an interaction with the Facebook servers, disclosing information about the visited web site together with the cookie.”

Roosendaal’s paper is available at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Our question is this: is there a way to change the system so that it is permissions-based?

Voluntary personal information sharing is most beautiful–and most powerful–when freely shared under circumstances chosen by the information holder. Today, however, we severely limit our power when we choose to share our information in closed sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. In those cases, we’re limited to sharing under rules set by those sites, and only to people who also agree to those closed practices.

Those sites are holding our information hostage, and the advertisers and marketing industry is paying wildly to keep this arrangement as a new status quo. This isn’t where we started though. Tim Berners-Lee reminds us that the web was built from “a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.” In a Scientific American article entitled Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Berners-Lee states,

Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently. Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

While these sites offer a social networking benefit, they jail us with inconveniences and rules that disallow the sharing of our lives outside of their fortress. We at I Shared What?!? look forward to the days when we’re empowered to share according to our own rules, in our own ways.

One of the beautiful things about voluntary, personal information sharing is that we have the option to interact with our friends and colleagues–as part of our social network–using a variety of tools and Internet services. It’s often a harsh reality check to be reminded that some of those tools and services don’t really want us to share in ways that we would like.

So it goes with sharing between service providers Google and Facebook. Each of them have useful collaborative, content sharing tools such as Facebook’s walls (telling in subtle ways) and photos, and Google’s docs, groups, and YouTube. Both providers also have ways to use your login as a single sign-on with other services (Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect).

What’s new: Google is reminding us that sharing your contacts with Facebook is a one-way street. It’s helpful to have a reminder that our sharing is not just about us, but often includes details and data about our friends that they may or may not wish to share about themselves. It’s a messy world while we figure this out.