{"id":5389,"date":"2010-05-17T00:00:23","date_gmt":"2010-05-16T22:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=5389"},"modified":"2010-05-23T20:54:14","modified_gmt":"2010-05-23T18:54:14","slug":"why-privacy-on-facebook-is-virtually-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/05\/why-privacy-on-facebook-is-virtually-impossible\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Privacy on Facebook Is ‘Virtually Impossible’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note:<\/strong> The controversy over Facebook’s aggressive attempts to cash in on information about its members is heating up. The San Francisco Chronicle<\/em> reports<\/a> that “anti-Facebook sentiment is surfacing in highly visible places, from the halls of Congress to the blogs and podcasts of influential technology experts like Leo Laporte of Petaluma.”It seems to me that ultimately their goal is to funnel all Internet traffic through Facebook.com,” said Laporte, who deleted his Facebook profile during a recent podcast and donated money to Diaspora, a project to create a more open and private alternative to Facebook. Laporte was inspired to put an end to his Facebook account by a recent blog post by Jason Calacanis, chief executive officer of Mahalo, a question-and-answer Web site. He accused Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of trading users’ privacy for profit. … Facebook convened a staff meeting Thursday to discuss the backlash, although some staff members described it as a routine gathering. …<\/p>\n

“Earlier this month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 other privacy and consumer organizations filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the popular social network of “unfair and deceptive trade practices” and violating users’ expectations of privacy and consumer protection laws. And last month, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., asked the FTC to develop guidelines instructing social networks on how private information can be used. All of this comes in the wake of the company’s launch of a new “open” social platform designed to bring Facebook features, such as its Like button, to other Web sites, and an experimental Instant Personalization feature that gives certain Web sites the ability to access a member’s name, profile picture, sex and network of friends. The company also launched community pages that made topics in a member’s profile more public.”<\/p>\n

Erik Hayden’s article below from Miller-McCune explores the results of a new study that suggest that privacy on Facebook is probably impossible: <\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/em><\/p>\n

On Facebook, You Are Who You Know<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even if you do have a mostly private Facebook profile, others can glean vital information about you \u2014 just by looking at your friend list.<\/em><\/p>\n

by Erik Hayden, Miller-McCune.com<\/em><\/p>\n

Remember the golden days when Facebook used to be for just college students<\/a>? It was a quainter site \u2014 with a much different set of rules.<\/p>\n

Drunken party photos used to be unceremoniously splayed out in public, privacy settings were almost nonexistent, wall posts weren\u2019t status updates and there was little need to filter regrettably off-color comments. After all, the only people (you assumed<\/a>) who saw that stuff were college buddies who were also posting the same incriminating photos of themselves on the site.<\/p>\n

Now, after the Facebook explosion<\/a>, users are more aware of privacy issues<\/a> than ever before and the new rule of thumb has become \u201ccurb public access to your profile as best you can.\u201d<\/p>\n

New research suggests that this is nearly impossible.<\/p>\n

In a study<\/a> conducted by Alan Mislove<\/a> of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems<\/a>, researchers tested an algorithm that could accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users by simply looking at their friend lists. The research culled profile information from two detailed social-network data sets: one from a sample of almost 4,000 students and alumni on Facebook at Rice University and another from more than 63,000 users in the New Orleans regional network.<\/p>\n

Researchers developed an algorithm to see if they could accurately infer attributes like high school or college, department of study, hometown, graduation year and even dormitory by dissecting these users\u2019 friend lists. The study cut to the core of the debate surrounding the social-networking site: Is your personal profile your own or, to paraphrase anti-Facebook crusader Leif Harmsen<\/a>, is it the site\u2019s profile about you?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe current privacy debate that\u2019s going on concerning Facebook is essentially covering explicitly provided attributes [i.e. information uploaded by you onto your profile],\u201d Mislove wrote. \u201cWe see our work as pointing out that there exist many implicitly provided attributes that aren\u2019t even being discussed.\u201d Namely, that your friend\u2019s profile can usually divulge more information than you think.<\/p>\n

According to the study, only about 5 percent of users in each network had changed their privacy settings to make their friend list inaccessible. (To hide it, enter your Facebook profile, click on the edit icon above your friends and unclick the blue box marked \u201cShow Friend List to everyone.\u201d) In the New Orleans network, personal profiles remained largely accessible to researchers. Some 58 percent of users disclosed university attended, 42 percent disclosed employers, 35 percent disclosed interests and 19 percent gave the public access to their location.<\/p>\n

Because of this information given, Mislove explained that it was relatively easy for his algorithm to accurately pinpoint attributes such as geography (dormitory or hometown) or education background (which high school or college users attend) for a specific user.<\/p>\n

In the New Orleans regional network, the algorithm unsurprisingly found that users were 53 times more likely to share the attribute of the same high school with those on their friend list than with other random users in the network. At Rice, the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that \u201cwith as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

While marketing companies who specialize in targeted advertising may rejoice, these results may be troubling for those who\u2019ve held out hope that Facebook could provide adequate privacy controls. Not to seem alarmist (\u201cprivacy\u201d on the Web has always been overrated), but if these researchers could develop a limited algorithm that can infer rudimentary attributes off locked profiles, the possibilities seem endless for others to harness advanced software that could render current privacy controls completely useless.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe privacy story on these sites is more complicated that we like to think, as your privacy is not just a function of what you provide, it\u2019s a function of what your friends and community members provide as well,\u201d Mislove elaborated.<\/p>\n

Researchers concluded that it wasn\u2019t \u201csufficient\u201d to just give users access to privacy controls for their own profiles; the option to censor friend lists should be given to make sure that private information cannot be inferred.<\/p>\n

As the title of the study states, on Facebook, you are who you know.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Erik Hayden recently graduated from Pepperdine University with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Religion. He is currently a fellow for Miller-McCune and regularly contributes for a variety of publications including the Ventura County Star and the alt-weekly, VCReporter. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2010 Miller-McCune.com All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n

GO TO ORIGINAL \u2013 MILLER-MCCUNE.COM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Earlier this month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 other privacy and consumer organizations filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the popular social network of “unfair and deceptive trade practices” and violating users’ expectations of privacy and consumer protection laws. And last month, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., asked the FTC to develop guidelines instructing social networks on how private information can be used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publicservice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}