Attitudes Towards Social Media Non-Users And Some Interesting Privacy Watchdog Sites

I have a team of students (very bright students, of course) who have been taking a hard look at social media and the risks of both being involved and the risks of not being involved.

They have come across lots of data (Key Finding:  It is highly likely that social media people LOVE to talk about social media (High confidence)), but we have not been able to find out one thing:  Do people who use social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) think that people who don't use them are weird? I don't necessarily mean weird in a pejorative way (though I am certainly interested in that interpretation).  It could be just sort of a reaction, like when someone says, "Oh, I don't have a Facebook account" and someone else would automatically think, "That's weird."

So, before I talk more about it more, answer the Swayable below:


Here's what I think we'll see:  A small but significant percentage of those that answer the question will say, "Yeah, it's weird."  If I could gather details, I would guess that there would be a fairly strong correlation between those that think it is weird and age (with younger people thinking it is weirder, obviously).

What is really weird, though is that we can't seem to find anyone who has asked this question before.

Changing the subject a little (but not much), I also wanted to highlight two sites, one old and one new, that provide an interesting insight into the subject of privacy in the age of social media.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/

The first is the wonderful What They Know courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.  This site lets you explore the privacy settings of some of the most popular apps for IOS and Android phones.  You can see a screen shot of part of the site at the right but you owe it to yourself to visit the interactive and a bit disquieting site.

The other site, Privacyscore (See screenshot below), is new but seems like it would be particularly valuable to anyone who searches the web (i.e. everyone).  The site can tell you, based on its own rating system, on a scale 1-100 (where 1 is very bad and 100 is very good), how private your activities on that site really are.  So, for example, Google.com scores an 85 whereas Bing scores only a 74.   Of particular interest to heavy web users or researchers are the Firefox and Chrome add-ons that will display a site's privacy score in real time as you search.

http://www.privacyscore.com/

Intel Official: Expect Less Privacy (NY Times)

There has been a good bit of talk already about DDNI Donald Kerr's speech regarding changing definitions of privacy. I am not sure I can add much to the debate but I have a couple of observations:

• First, giving up information voluntarily to a site like Facebook is very different than the government looking at your private life without permission. Kerr states, according to the NY Times, "''I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn't empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.'' Much of what is done on most sites is to our direct benefit; much of what the government would do would be to our indirect benefit and I am not sure that giving up traditional notions of privacy is worth it.

• Second, I think Facebook is a particularly bad example of giving up anonymity. I have just recently become active on Facebook and it seems to me that much of what is happening there is advertisement. Maybe that is too strong but the idea that people present a particular public view of themselves on Facebook rather than their private view of themselves is almost cliche' among users of social networking sites (for a funny but NSFM (Not safe for mom) send up of the lies people tell on MySpace, listen to Pete Miser's "Add Me!").

• Finally, it is interesting to compare notions of identity in cyberspace with notions of privacy. For a really good talk about new notions of identity, see Dick Clarence Hardt's speech about Identity 2.0 at OSCON 05. The speech itself is worth watching if only for the very different style Hardt uses but the content is worth listening to as well.