Watch out for those 1990s Hackers
Rather than deconstruct the magic of this video, I'll let you. Enjoy!
HACKING IS EASY! from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.
Connectivity is a Marketer's Dream
Just another snazzy day in the life of selling you items you don't even realize you're craving.
NY Times writer, Stephanie Clifford, reports
Through smartphones that signal someone’s location, stores and brands like Starbucks, Tasti-D-Lite, Macy’s and Pepsi are getting live information about when and where people are shopping. Some companies are turning Foursquare into a virtual loyalty-card program, while others are creating their own location applications, offering customers discounts or other rewards for shopping.
“It gives us immediate feedback for what’s going on in the marketplace,” said Margery Schelling, chief marketing officer of PepsiCo Foodservice. “That’s invaluable.”
When Issues of Privacy Go "Viral"
A broad coalition of technology companies, including AT&T, Google and Microsoft, and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum said Tuesday that it would push Congress to strengthen online privacy laws to protect private digital information from government access.
While this proposed legislation would tighten privacy rights for online users to prevent the government from accessing our information, these protections don't acknowledge the ways in which our data is mined on a daily basis for potential marketing targets. Do we accept consumer data mining because we're cool with free market capitalism? Why is it more acceptable for a marketer to manipulate me while I assume Big Brother is coming to take away my rights when a governing body accesses my personal information? How are they different? One is an illusion of free choice while the second doesn't even try to disguise its ability to mine my data.
In "Mastercard Set to Open an Online Shopping Mall," Andrew Martin focuses on how Mastercard is creating an online shopping site, Mastercard Marketplace, that will use a new technology to monitor customer behavior all over the internet to better target the customer. As part of his report, he interviews Anita L. Allen, a law professor who studies privacy issues at the University of Pennsylvania. Allen says that as consumers give up more private information for short-term gains,
“'In the end, we turn into citizens who live in a world where we have no control over our own data.'”
Martin's article works well with the Helft piece because both suggest free market capitalism as a naturalized entity that does not seem to concern people as much as governmental invasions of privacy.
This recent editorial in the NY Times discusses online privacy in connection to government officials having no real legal prohibitions to prevent them from invading a user's privacy. However, there is a move toward developing legislation that will take issues of internet privacy into account. I do think this is important, but again, I find it ironic how willingly people accept being marketed to because of data mining.
In "Bringing a Smarter Search to Twitter, With Fees," Todd Woody highlights the strong connection between marketing and internet use. Here, people are willing to pay for a Twitter service that will (like Google) decide which feeds are most useful to the user. That service will use a data collecting technology to customize info for users, but this information can easily be used for marketing purposes, too.
Woody talks with the folks at the forefront of this entrepreneurial venture:
“TweetUp is to Twitter what Google is to the Web,” Mr. Case said.
Here is how the service will work, according to Mr. Gross: people can bid on key words or phrases, like “iPad” or “solar energy,” to push their Twitter profile or posts to the top of TweetUp’s rankings. Bids begin at 1 cent and people will pay each time their profile or a post shows up in a search.
Mr. Gross stressed that bids were not required to appear in search results. The service will also calculate rankings based on an algorithm that uses data from a company called Klout that measures a Twitter user’s influence. Bit.ly, a service that shortens Web addresses for display on Twitter, will provide data on how often people click on a link in a post.
So who does Mr. Gross expect to pay to put something as ephemeral as a Twitter post on top of the charts? “I think everyone who is looking to build a following will pay,” he said. That means companies that want to build their brands as well as individuals who hope to drive readers to their Web sites.
Beyond explicit economic reasons for data mining (what folks are often up in arms about in relation to e-privacy), many online newspaper services are asking whether the veil of 'privacy' for their viewers should be pulled back a bit. Richard Pérez-Peña reports in "News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments" that the days of unmediated nasty comments or the prevalent 'LOL' and 'So Random' internet shout-outs may be numbered:
When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.
The Washington Post plans to revise its comments policy over the next several months, and one of the ideas under consideration is to give greater prominence to commenters using real names.
The New York Times, The Post and many other papers have moved in stages toward requiring that people register before posting comments, providing some information about themselves that is not shown onscreen.
...“Anonymity is just the way things are done. It’s an accepted part of the Internet, but there’s no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments,” said Arianna Huffington, a founder of The Huffington Post. “I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.”
Privacy: an Academic Perspective
It's easy to find scads of information online about privacy issues and news, but what is the academic world saying? A quick search on my school's library brought up a multitude of articles. Timeliness seems to become more prevalent in today's age of information, so I decided to review a couple of the most recently published articles.
Consumer Trust in the Online Retail Context: Exploring the Antecedents and Consequences
Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 27(4): 323–346 (April 2010)
This article explored many issues surrounding web site quality and usability as well as consumer trust, intentions and attitudes. Through prior research, the authors developed 21 hypotheses and conducted their own Internet-based survey, which yielded 452 usable records (95% between the ages of 18 and 35.) The authors, in true academic fashion, delve deep into their findings with mathematical analyses. In short:
The results show that Web site quality features, including usability, security and privacy assurances, and product information quality, significantly and positively influence trust.
In other words, this study's main (and most compelling) finding is this: "This study shows that having an easy-to-use Web site is the key to e-commerce success."
I guess good design and ethics have become one in the same!
Disclosure of personal and contact information by young people in social networking sites: An analysis using Facebook profiles as an example
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Vol 6(1): 81-101 (April 2010)
This article discussed a lot of the same type of information that I've been seeing lately: Facebook (and other social networking) users tend to reveal a lot of personal information and are unaware of their privacy options or who can view their profile. They are also, for the most part, unaware of their loss of privacy just by using these sites.
What I found most interesting about this article, however, was the discussion of the definition of privacy, broken into four "concepts":
1. Control over information about oneself.
2. Control over one's own personal information.
Westin, moreover, argues that individuals are continually engaged in a process of adjustment to find a balance between the desire for privacy and the desire for disclosure of one’s self to others.
3. "The third concept focuses on privacy standing in competition with two very different ideas: the 'monitored’ and the ‘searchable’ part of anyone’s life (Lessing 1998)."
According to Lessing (1998: 1), privacy is ‘what’s left after one subtracts, as it were, the monitored, and the searchable, from the balance of social life’. He continues, stating that ‘life where less is monitored is a life more private’ and ‘life where less can be searched is a life more private’
4. "The fourth concept sees privacy as ‘the immunity from the judgment of others’ (Johnson 1992: 272), referring to those aspects of a person’s life that are culturally recognized as being safe and protected from others’ judgements."
I think that, while the first and second "concepts" are what are generally thought of when the issue of privacy is brought up, the third and fourth concepts have become increasingly apparent in the age of online social media.
It's certainly true in my own life. Ten years ago, I started a "blog" (which wasn't called a blog back then). It was completely public, but I never thought that would be a concern. After all, the Internet wasn't the animal it is today; hardly anyone blogged, and "google" had yet to become a verb. The blog attracted a readership and was a joy to keep up. I was devastated when some undesirable family found it and judged me for what they'd found. They didn't understand the creative freedoms I was taking. They didn't "get" it, and there was nothing I could do to change that.
After that, I discovered privacy options and have been using them religiously since. However, I often find myself grappling with Westin's discussion of the balance between the desire for privacy, and the desire for self disclosure. The "delete", "edit", and "remove" buttons have become quite familiar to me, and I'm not afraid to use them. I often miss the random connections of strangers, though; something impossible to obtain when everything is "hidden." I've attempted completely public blogs since, but none of them gave me the same feeling as that first one. I'm always paranoid that someone undesirable is going to come across it. I find myself analyzing every sentence I write. It will never be the same. It's true what they say: Ignorance is bliss.
googleprivacy channel
YouTube - googleprivacy's Channel
Apparently Google has an entire youtube channel devoted to privacy issues. Currently, the channel houses 49 videos. The main page video makes mention of Google's Data Liberation Front site, which states:
The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products. This is our mission statement:
Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.
Interesting! I will definitely be experimenting with this site in the near future.
Congressman Wants Consumers to Have Personal Information Take-Down Right
TechLaw: Congressman Wants Consumers to Have Personal Information Take-Down Right:
There is a lot that can be said about this legislation, none of it positive, except for the fact that there is little chance it will be enacted into law. Nobody in Washington is talking about giving individuals this level of control over their personal information. The FTC is worried about consumers' lack of understanding about what is being done with their personal information and their inability to exert meaningful control over that. Businesses would like lawmakers to focus on personal information misuse and let the marketplace decide how much information collection and processing is desirable. (This is how Washington solved the Great Anti-Spyware Scare: it legislated against the really bad stuff, but gave business free rein for everything else that's not deceptive or criminal.) Nobody is talking about giving consumers a quasi take-down right.
Cloud computing: Privacy and trust up in the cloud
BBC News - Cloud computing: Privacy and trust up in the cloud
This article addresses the issue of privacy "in the cloud," but not in much detail, and definitely seems biased toward the companies who offer these services. It states:
Dropbox has more than four million customers who can upload digital content which is permanently synced across a number of their devices.
Adam Gross, senior vice president of marketing for the storage service said the cloud needs the trust of users.
He believes the cloud is "helping people keep their files backed up and safe and secure, rather than the old model where each individual PC user had to be responsible for it alone."
The following part of the article was of great interest to me. I use Gmail and Google Docs quite a bit for schoolwork (and even work-related things) and definitely take for granted that those documents are always available from any computer. Rarely do I also back up the files on a jump drive or some other tangible media.
Many students have become heavy users of the free collaborative online tools that are based in the cloud. This has prompted some colleges to go as far as banning cloud computing completely.
Others like the University of San Francisco have to send out constant reminders that trouble on the net is unacceptable as a classroom excuse.
Not relying on the cloud entirely is one concern, but critics advise students to ponder on the physical location of their work, issues over ownership, and the rising fees for accessing it.
These factors may have to be taken into account by governments too in the future, and legislation could be needed to define new parameters for consumers.
Moving information to a virtual computer puts someone else in control of security, and there is an ever-present risk from hackers.
There, near the bottom of the article, the possibility of hackers was finally mentioned. I decided to do a bit more research on privacy in the cloud and found this article, which took a much more frank look at the issues of privacy in cloud computing and provided several examples of what hackers have accomplished. For example:
There already have been examples of privacy and security problems with cloud services provider Google. In March 2009, it was revealed, “Google discovered a privacy glitch that inappropriately shared access to a small fraction of word-processing and presentation documents stored on the company’s online Google Docs service.” Though the technical problem was fixed, customers’ sensitive data was exposed, and consumers had no control over the security situation. In July, A hacker was able break into a Twitter employee’s e-mail account and through that was able to get to confidential business documents that were stored on the business version of Google Apps.
Global Free Trade Zone Labor via Internet
Today's NY Times "Technology" section ran an article that highlights how an internet security measure like captchas (a mechanism that forces the user to input a string of words to prevent the proliferation of spam) matters little when spammers outsource labor to willing workers in developing countries. Vikas Bajaj writes
Sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end deciphering convoluted characters and typing them into a box is monotonous work. And the pay is not great when compared to more traditional data-entry jobs.
Still, it appears to be attractive enough to lure young people in developing countries where even 50 cents an hour is considered a decent wage. Unskilled male farm workers earn about $2 a day in many parts of India.
Ariful Islam Shaon, a 20-year-old college student in Bangladesh, said he has a team of 30 other students who work for him filling in captchas. (The term is a loose acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.”)