Privacy and Social Networking:

Managing Your Personal Information

By Joseph J. Barton

 Introduction

     Doing business and pleasure on the Internet today is a lot like walking around with a billboard hanging on your neck. What are you putting on your billboard for all to see? Is there so much information on it that it weighs you down, maybe even begins to choke you? I am guilty of it, the above is my profile picture on Facebook, and even it alone is pretty telling. With a visit to the site as someone I haven’t yet “friended”, you’d find it there, alongside information such as I am currently studying at San Jose State. Most of us would never give out our personal information to a stranger on the street. However, according to Riva Richmond (2011) of the New York Times, such information as your place of birth, birthday, home value, marital status, and even a picture of your front door are available to anyone ready to pony-up ($13.95 for a three month subscription) for the service Spokeo.com provides. All someone needs is your name.

     This reality may seem shocking to some, but not to those of us who’ve looked at the information available about ourselves online using only Google, Facebook and sites such as Spokeo’s. So, in a world of readily available information, what are some of today’s privacy concerns and how can we manage them to minimize the risks associated with sharing information online? To answer this question, I will first define some relevant terms, illustrate some issues facing individuals and business alike, and then propose some solutions to allow us to better manage our private information.

Definitions

     According to Petrino (2002), privacy management is how people negotiate openness and privacy of communicated information. Coming from the socio-cultural tradition, it focuses on how people in relationships manage boundaries which separate public information from private. Communication privacy management theory seeks to explain what revealing information we decide to keep concealed versus what we choose to share.    

                                                                                                            (Adams, 2011) 

     Cookies give websites the ability to save information on their visitors. By keeping and updating this information over time and by adding this information with cookies from other websites, it is easy to develop an accurate profile of a person’s online activity (Kesan & Shah, 2009). Simply put, Internet cookies allow a web site you’ve visited to basically follow you around as you visit other sites.

     Curtis Silver (2010), in a Wired.com article, says data is anything you put in the computer that goes to the Internet and either gets lost or sold. He goes on to ask exactly what private or personal data is on the Internet answering “not a damn thing.”

     One zettabyte is equal to one trillion gigabytes of information, or the equivalent of 250 billion DVD’s (Ford, 2011).

Privacy Concerns for Individuals

            In a webinar by Purchell and Salmond (2011) detailing the findings of a recent Pew study, they indicate that 73% of teens, 82% of young adults, and 64% of adults forty and up use social networking sites such as Facebook. Fogel and Nehmad (2009) accurately describe the findings of their research done on 205 inner city college students. They found that more than three quarters of surveyed students had a Facebook account, while a third owned sites elsewhere. Only 16% of the participants expressed the highest privacy concerns for a stranger knowing their schedule and where they lived, yet 22% of those students still provided their home address and 40% provided their schedule of classes (Fogel, 2009). That adds up to a lot of people throwing caution to the wind and offering up piles of data whether or not they’re actually concerned about their own privacy, and most seemingly aren’t.

     Steve Lohr (2010) mentions in a New York Times article that two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, using data collected from social networking sites, had accurately predicted the full, nine digit Social Security numbers for 8.5% of people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003. That’s nearly five million people! Also reported by Lohr, in a class project at M.I.T. two students analyzed 4000 Facebook pages and they were able to predict with 78% accuracy whether or not each page belonged to a gay individual. 

                                                                                              (Logos-s-collection.blogspot.com, 2011) 

     In Fogel’s findings, he reports the average number of “friends” on profiles was 239 (2009). This means that even if your Facebook privacy settings have been changed from the default which allows anyone to view your page to the “friends of friends” setting, an average of 57,121 (239 x 239) individuals have access to your data. This clearly indicates the need for individuals to be careful who they “Add as Friend.” 

     Furthermore, since the advent of Internet “cookies”, sites have been able to trace our patterns of online use. Kesan and Shah (2009) state “legal scholars use cookies as an example of how privacy can be affected by the design of communication technology” (p.317).  Now, with the development of open-graph technology, Facebook’s ever-popular “like” button has changed traceability in the favor of corporate marketing forever. Clicking the wrong “like” button on your inappropriate buddy’s comments could keep you from a job someday. It’s scary to think about, but a reality we all live today.

Privacy Concerns for Business

             In an article in The Economist, Ford (2011) writes that during February of this year Hewlett-Packard introduced its new tablet computer, which it hopes will compete with Apple’s iPad. The event was far less exciting than it may have been, thanks to the leaking of the design in January. He goes on to remind us that other technology companies have suffered from similar information leaks lately. Recently Dell’s timetable for bringing tablets to market appeared earlier than they hoped on a tech-news website. The schedule for new products from NVIDIA, which makes graphics chips, also seeped out. He also recounts instances of corporate privacy leaks from companies like Coca-Cola, Facebook, Renault and AOL. He also discusses WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his claims of a scandal involving an American bank CEO. This sent big banks such as Bank of America scrambling for weeks. As concerns over information leaks grow, he offers a graph (below) which helps illustrate the projected growth rate for zettabytes of information transferred online (2011).    

                                                                                                                 (Ford, 2011)

            Hashimoto, Immamura, Kitagata, Osawa and Shiratori (2010) propose a privacy management architecture to protect Internet users from unnecessary leakage of private information and attempt to provide a reliable scheme for privacy management. This architecture is centered around the idea of a “web service broker”, an indepentant entity that would exist between the user/client and the web service providers requiring any private information. I think this is simply a crazy idea which would only lead to the further selling or leaking of private information. A middle man for private information exchange is the best we can do, really?

Possible Solutions

            The inherent problem is expectations. People, and corporations, expect their data to remain private. This expectation is usually set at some point by the site people are entering their data into. Perhaps it’s a site like Linkedin, where the expectation is transparency. The problem is no one reads the terms of service contracts. When you click the box to continue, you are agreeing to pages of legalese that state you don’t have any personal or private data on the site because they own it all (Silver, 2011).

            Privacy communities are the central element of an article by Kernchen, Kolter and Pernul (2010). They indicate there are open web and Wiki-like organized privacy communities available online. They enable users to collaboratively exchange privacy-relevant information, ratings, experiences and opinions about service providers. This information would include, for instance, the required amount of personal data for the service as well as third parties the provider shares personal data with. Collaborative privacy communities are valuable data sources and facilitate a form of provider-independent privacy protection (Kernchen, 2010).

            Richmond advises that if an individual is worried, the best way to find out what information is available about you online is to search for it yourself. To manage your own privacy, the obvious place to start is with the search engines like Google and Bing that someone else would be likely to go. She said to run keyword searches of your name, addresses and phone numbers to see what turns up. There are companies willing to do the work for you, such as the privacy software start-up company Abine, who charge $99 a year for quarterly reports detailing the information available about you online (2011).

     The most important thing to remember is simply to control what you choose to share with the world. Be mindful that future employers, professors and parents are able to draw conclusions based on the way you present yourself online. The following video from Brandon Roudebush (2009) describes this best:

Conclusion

            We are sharing more and more information over the Internet every day. Most of us are uploading tons of dangerous data into social networking sites such as Facebook, which invites intrusion. Internet cookies are tracking our every online move, yet even the corporations who collect that data are facing greater and greater risks of information leakages. There are many possible solutions to this social problem, such as private services, collaborative privacy communities, and even web service brokers. However, the best thing you can do is to stay mindful of what you put online. If you adjust your expectations and expect the transparency of everything you do online, it makes it much easier to watch what you do and say to the entire world. Remember the billboard…and don’t let it strangle you.

Scholarly Sources

Fogel, J., & Nehmad, E. (2009). Internet social network communities: Risk taking, trust and privacy concerns. Computers in Human Behavior 25(1). 153-160. DOI:10.1016/j.chb.2008.08.006

Hashimoto, K., Imamura, S., Kitagata, G., Osawa, Y., Shiratori, N., & Takeda, A. (2010). A proposal of privacy management architecture. Applications and the Internet (SAINT), 2010 10^th IEEE/ISPJ International Symposium on 19-23, July.161-164.

DOI: 10.1109/SAINT.2010.74

Kernchen, T., Kolter, J., & Pernal, G. (2010). Challenges for security, privacy and trust: Collaborative privacy management. Computers and Security, 29. 580-591.

DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2009.12.007  

Kesan, J. P. & Shah, R. C. (2009). Recipes for cookies: How institutions shape communication technologies. New Media Society 11: 315.

DOI: 10.1177/1461444808101614

Other Sources

Ford, J. (2011, April 6). The leaky corporation. The Economist (from the February 24 print ed.). Retrieved from:                        http://www.economist.com/node/18226961?story_id=18226961

Lohr, S. (2010). How privacy vanishes online. New York Times March 17. Retrieved from: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technology/17privacy.html?ref=privacy

Richmond, R. (2011). How to fix (or kill) web data about you. New York Times April 13. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/technology/personaltech/14basics.html?_r=1&ref=privacy

Silver, C. (2010). The Facebook privacy war: What is personal data? Wired.com May 7, 2010. Retrieved from:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/05/the-facebook-privacy-war-what-is-personal-data/

Pew Study

Purchell Ph.D., K., & Salmond, K. (2011, February 9). Trends in teen communication and social media use: What’s really going on here? Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Presentations/2011/Feb/Pew%20Internet_Girl%20Scout%20Webinar%20PDF.pdf 

Websites

Adams, E. (2011). A security innovation blog covering software engineering, cyber security, and application risk management. Application and cyber security blog

March 15. Retrieved from:                             

http://web.securityinnovation.com/blog/bid/58463/Cyber-Security-Warning-Syste

Choose your privacy settings (2011). Facebook. Retrieved from:                                                       

http://www.facebook.com/#!/settings/?tab

Logo-s-collection.blogspot.com (2011). Facebook privacy logo. Retrieved from:                                                                          

http://logo-s-collection.blogspot.com/2009/10/facebook-logos-facebook-facebook-logo.html

Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany: SUNY Press.  Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_privacy_management_theory

Roudebush, B. (2009). Social Networking Privacy. Retrieved from:                                   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki5xxqpFNLg