I’ve been reading some work on privacy and social networks recently, and this combined with Ratliff’s “Gone Forever: What Does It Really Take to Disappear” has led me to think about whether a geek with a website that is clearly their own (e.g. Christopher-Parsons.com) should reasonably expect restraining laws to extend to digital spaces. I’m not really talking at the level of law necessarily, but at a level of normativity: ought a restraining order limit a person from ‘following’ me online as it does from being near me in the physical world?
Restraining orders are commonly issued to prevent recurrences of abuse (physical or verbal) and stalking. While most people who have a website are unable to track who is visiting their webspace, what happens when you compulsively check your server logs (as many good geeks do) and can roughly correlate traffic to particular geo-locations. As a loose example, let’s say that you were in a small town, ‘gained’ an estranged spouse, and then notice that there are regular hits to your website from that small town after you’ve been away from it for years. Let’s go further and say that you have few/no friends in that town, and that you do have a restraining order that is meant to prevent your ex-spouse from being anywhere near you. Does surfing to your online presence (we’ll assume, for this posting, that they aren’t commenting or engaging with the site) normatively constitute a breach of an order?
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While it’s not the core focus of my research, I pay a lot of attention to trends and conversations about social media, and particularly focus on common standards that support the ’semantic’ capabilities of web-enabled appliances. In this post I want to think about ways of ’structuring’ social media along a set of continuums/formalized networks and the role of HTML 5’s semantic possibilities in pushing past the present set of social networking environments.
Social Media as a Hub
As shown in the image to the left, social platforms are situated in the middle of a set of larger social media items; platforms are integrative, insofar as they are able to make calls to other social items and enrich the platform. Under a ’social media as hub’ continuum, we might imagine that ’spoke-based’ media items facilitate highly targeted uses; while MMORPGs are ’social’, they are hyper-targeted and meant to maintain their own internal infrastructure. Read more…
I’m on Twitter all the time; it’s central to how I learn about discussions taking place about Deep Packet Inspection, a good way of finding privacy-folk from around the world, and lets me feel semi-socialized even though I’m somewhat reclusive. When I use the social networking service, I intersperse bits of ‘me’ (e.g. This wine sucks!) beside news articles I’ve found and believe would be useful to my colleagues, and add in some (attempts at) humor. In this sense, I try to make my Twitter feed feel ‘authentic’, meaning that it is reasonably reflective of how I want to present myself in digital spaces. Further, that presentation resonates (to varying extents) with how I behave in the flesh.
When you hear social-media enthusiasts talk about their media environment, authenticity (i.e. not pretending to be someone/something you’re really, absolutely, not) is the key thing to aim for. Ignoring the amusing Heideggerian implications of this use of authenticity (“How very They!), I think that we can take this to mean that there is a ‘currency’ in social media called ‘authenticity’. There are varying ways of gauging this currency. Read more…
I’m on Facebook, and have been for years. I also dislike Facebook, and have for several years. I don’t dislike the social networking service because it’s bad at what it aims to do, but because it’s far too good at what it does. Let’s be honest: Facebook does not exist to ‘help me connect to my friends’. Maybe that was its aim when it was first dreamt up, but the current goal of Facebook is to make money from my data. Part of this involves Facebook mining my data, and another (and more significant) part entails third-party developers mining my data. I want to think out loud about this latter group and their practices.
A core issue (amongst several others) that Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) raised in their recent findings about Facebook focused on the data that third-party application developers gain access to when an individual installs an Facebook application. Before getting into this in any depth, I just want to recognize the full range of information that application developers can call on using the Facebook API: Read more…
