Archive for the ‘Privacy’ Category

Oct

2011

03

Category:

Networks, Privacy

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7 Comments

Notes from Mari Smith Facebook Changes Webinar: Privacy Settings and A New Metric – People Talking About

Facebook Changes: A Complete Guide – by Mari Smith  

View more presentations from Mari Smith

Last Friday,  social media guru Mari Smith offered a free webinar that took a deep dive through the Facebook changes,  and how they work for both individuals and brands.      You can download the slides here and listen to the recording here.     The webinar was 90 minutes and she took us through step-by-step about how the new features work.       At times it was confusing, complicated, and overwhelming, but I came away a couple of ways to think about the changes in terms of privacy.  Also, a few insights about the what the changes mean for Facebook pages.

Sharing Philosophy

We can no longer think about privacy and sharing as a black and white issue.  It isn’t all private or all public – it’s a continuum.      Facebook’s new changes (and Google +) gives us a couple of shades of gray.    You need to think about what you’re sharing and who you are sharing with.

What Are You Sharing?

Private: This is obvious, but information like your social security number,bank account number,  passwords,  birthday w/year,  or intensely private information that if made public could embarrass you or put you in personal danger.

Personal: In an age of Facebook, many of our close friends and family are using it – and we’re sharing family photos, what we do in our leisure time, hobbies, our location, and all sorts of personal information.

Professional: This content  generally includes sharing trade craft, resources, and other items related to professional skill sets.

Organizational: This is when you are sharing information as an official spokesperson for your organization or your organizational persona.  Typically, this information about your brand or nonprofit.

The boundaries between sharing definitions are very blurry.     Some people blend the personal with the professional or organization to make the brand more “human” or personalized.      Some people are comfortable with this, while others are not.   It is a judgement call.     For example,  a colleague recently said to me,  “I have a mix of people who are my friends – my family and friends as well as professionals in my field.  I don’t really feel comfortable sharing the fact that I took my kids to Chuck Cheese with all my professional colleagues who are friends with me on Facebook.”

Mari Smith suggested that we should ask ourselves how we would feel if anything we posted on Facebook would show up on the front page of the New York Times, in Google Search, or if her mother would approve.

Who Are You  Sharing With?

With the changes on Facebook, it is a good idea to get into the habit of training yourself to look who you are sharing with every time you post.     You now have the ability to control who you sharing on each status update.   If you use a mobile phone app to post, go into your privacy settings and set it what you’re most comfortable with because the mobile apps don’t have the audience selector feature yet.    The setting remembers your last setting – so if you will switching between public and friends only postings or to specific lists – you need to pay attention to that icon.

If you haven’t been using the  ”friends list” feature that allows you to group friends into categories, it might be more useful to you because you can filter the stories you see in News Feed or post an update for specific people    They’ve now added “Smart Lists“, these are the lists with the icons.   The smart lists include  ”Acquaintances,”, “Close Friends” and “Restricted”  (example:  everyone but mom and dad).      There are also smart lists for related to geography or what you’ve listed as work.

Sharing in Public

The “public” option for sharing updates means that anyone can see an update  that you’ve shared publicly and anyone who has “subscribed” to your updates.      The “subscribe” option has to be activated – and the average user on Facebook will probably not want to do this.   However, if you use your Facebook profile to connect with professional colleagues or want to promote your organization, you might consider this option.   The subscribe option gives you another channel to share public information related to your work or professional life.   There is a trade off is that your friends my not want to comment if they notice people they don’t know.

If you’re going to mix it up,  Mari suggested that you indicate who you are sharing the update with so people know.

News Ticker

The News Ticker is on the right-hand side when you log into your account.  It shows all your friends’ activity in real-time.   When you hover over an item on ticker, you can see the full story and join the conversation as it happens.    From a privacy standpoint, if you comment on a post on the ticker,  be sure you notice what the original privacy settings are on the post.   If you aren’t comfortable with who can see the post,  don’t comment on it or like it.  If you do, a story about your activity will appear on Facebook, including on your timeline (profile), in News Feed and in ticker.    Your comments and likes are only visible to people who can see the original post. For example, you might comment on a photo one of your family members posts just to family.  A friend of yours who cannot already view the photo will not see a story in ticker about your comment.

Brand Page Changes

Mari went over all the changes to brand pages, including the most dramatic one: Facebook has nuked the “like” button.    People no longer have to “like” or join your Fan Page to comment or like content posted on the wall. The good news is that barriers to interacting on your page have been greatly reduced.    It is not as critical to focus on building up the fan base.   She mentioned the growing importance of the “share”  button – which she described as the equivalent to “retweet” on Twitter.   She suggested encouraging more share with a specific call to action on the post itself.

I was watching the ticker and for now, noticing it is my friends activity – and not brand activity – but I can see if my friends have commented, shared, or like content on a brand’s Facebook Page.    So, the more you can develop relationships with people and encourage interaction with your content, the more likely they will pay attention to your stuff.

Facebook Rolls Out New Metric: People Talking About

Last night Facebook announced some changes to Insights, the analytics program that we use for tracking Facebook pages, that includes a new metric, “People Talking About.”    While Mari didn’t cover this in the webinar,  she posted a article from ClickZ worth reading.

“People Talking About This” will be the new Facebook metric,  both for page owners and Facebook users.  This number will be displayed *publicly* below your total likes (fans)!!  More new stats include, “Friends of Fans” and “Total Reach.”    Mari points out the  important nugget: “We’re moving away from the era of ‘likes;’ we’re now measuring what people discuss on Facebook and a brand’s total reach.”

As Facebook continues to roll out and tweak these changes and as individual users and brands begin to absorb and leverage them,  we’re all learning in real time about what will work and what won’t.



Sep

2011

24

Category:

Privacy

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10 Comments

The Tension Between Publicness and Privacy

Last month, Facebook launched a major overhaul in the privacy settings. The changes, more than a dozen in all, were in two key areas: privacy changes to user profiles and changes to how users share content. Now with the changes to the timeline, actions, and open graph announced on Thursday, I’ve been hearing a lot of concerns, fears, and reports from nonprofit folks that their audiences are upset.

The news ticker on the upper right that is streaming all your friends updates in real time. While I found it annoying and looked for a way to turn it off, I’m hearing from that their networks are confusing – thinking that those updates are public – and asking their friends to “unsubscribe” them. Scoble observed this pattern and offered some advice on how to reduce the clutter.

Jesse Stay posted this in his Facebook update:

Dear friends, if you don’t want your comments appearing in my ticker, please unfriend me. Don’t friend people who you don’t want to see your comments in the ticker on the right! This ensures the best experience for everyone.

For everyone else, enable the subscribe button so they can still get your updates, but not affect the ticker. BTW, if you unfriend me, and you have subscriptions turned on, I will still remain subscribed to your updates, but I won’t see your comments in my ticker! (Although, as it has always been, I will still see them in my news feed, btw)

All this copying of status updates asking people to unsubscribe from comments is silly.

 

Some step-by-steps.

There is a larger issue here -the tension between privacy and publicness as Jeff Jarvis calls it.   In fact, that is the topic of his new book,  ”Private Parts:  How Sharing in the Digital Age Can Improve Work and Life.”     We hear more about the fears related to privacy, rather than the benefits.   He isn’t saying that privacy isn’t important, but points out that when a new technology comes along – we only hear about the fears.    He says that publicness is important because it builds relationships – and that helps with movements.  (A lot of what we talked about in the Networked Nonprofit)

I have been doing mini-trainings on privacy for those are concerned about privacy, but not technologically savvy.   These have been a walk through the privacy settings of different social networks, particularly Facebook so that people understand the degrees of choices – from totally opened to totally closed online (the latter isn’t really totally possible online).

My advice has been general common sense:

1.)  Don’t accept friend requests from complete strangers

2.) Understand your privacy settings and make choices about what you want to share – and it isn’t going to black and white, probably shades of grade based on your relationships with people – and the type of content you are sharing.   We haven’t had to think about this in the past.

If you are worried about what is being shared on the news ticker, here are some step-by-steps from Mari Smith to get better control of that.  Also read this post.

3.) Think about the information you are sharing online and who might be reading it – but not from a place of fear or “something bad will happen.”   Also think about opportunities and benefits.

What are  your thoughts about the tension between privacy and publicness?  What is your personal approach to sharing information on social networks?   What are people thinking or saying in your organization?

Update:  Some more thoughts about privacy and Facebook from Mari Smith, including a link to a this post:  Why Timeline Changes Everything.

 

 

May

2011

25

Category:

E-Mediat, Privacy, social media policy

Tags:

4 Comments

Privacy and Security on Social Networks

A colleague recently shared this video that pokes fun of  the  “always on, gotta share everything on social networks” lifestyle for many people here in America.  It is a serious issue for professionals here in the US, especially if  they work in education or youth service nonprofits.    In many places in the world,  sharing everything online can be a life and death matter particularly for activists working in certain countries.

For the curriculum we’re developing for the  E-Mediat project, a social media capacity project for NGOs in the Arab World,  you can’t train NGOs on effective use of social media without addressing issues of privacy and security.   This past month,  I took a deep dive looking at the privacy and security how-to guides available.    I thought I’d share (couldn’t resist) and summarize some of what I learned here.

There are two particularly useful guides (both available in other languages including Arabic).   They are Security in a Box and Protecting Your Security Online.    Both guides are  written for citizens in the Middle East and North Africa who want to use technology safely to communicate, organize, and share data, but the tips and recommendations are useful for anyone working for a nonprofit who needs to mindful about privacy.   Here’s a curated collection of  privacy tutorials for NGOs  here.

Privacy

Social networking sites like Facebook make it easy for sensitive information about us to be made public unintentionally.   Therefore, it is important to understand how to best protect one’s own privacy as well as others. Tactical Technology’s Security in A Box suggests asking a couple of good reflective questions about your account on any online social networking platform where you set up a presence:

  • Who can access the information I am putting online?
  • Who controls and owns the information I put into a social networking site?
  • What information about me are my contacts passing on to other people?
  • Will my contacts mind if I share information about them with other people?
  • Do I trust everyone with whom I’m connected?

Publishing content on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms has become a requirement for NGOs that want a presence and to participate on social channels.   However, they should not rely on a social platform as the single host for their information.   First, it is very easy for governments to block access and it can happen without warning.  Also,  some social networking sites may remove objectionable content themselves, rather than face a censorship battle .   There are also other reasons to avoid publishing all your content on social sites.

Be careful about sharing too much information in your status updates – even if you trust your “friends.”  In the United States,  sharing too much information has resulted in  burglaries.    It is easy for someone to copy status information.    Most social networks allow automatically cross posting  information with other social networks.  For example your tweets can be automatically shared on your Facebook account.   You may be intentionally sharing sensitive information from one channel to another.  Plus, it isn’t a good practice for inspiring engagement.

Some social network platforms, like Facebook,  make assumptions about your privacy intentions.  Some assume that you want to share your information publicly and this is reflected in the the “default” settings which are overly complex.     Whenever you set up an account, make sure you understand the ins and out of privacy settings.      On the  site Open Book you can search Facebook and understand what is open. You can also use Reclaim Privacy, a browser tool that helps you adjust your Facebook privacy settings, although I encountered a few glitches.

Security

The AccessNow Guide offers some critical basic tips for protecting security on free hosted email services like Google’s Gmail and Hotmail, both offers something called end-to-end encryption (HTTPS) which makes using them secure.     More advice on keeping email communication, see Security in a Box tip sheet and for specifics regarding Gmail see the  security check list and Hotmail’s guide.   This FireFox plugin called HTTPS Everywhere is handy.

Normally, voice communication over the Internet is no more secure than unprotected email and instant messaging. Only Skype and Gizmo offer encryption for voice conversations, and then only if you are calling another VoIP user, as opposed to a mobile or landline telephone.  See Security in a Box tip sheet for more options.

Be careful when accessing your social network account in public internet spaces. Delete your password and browsing history when using a browser on a public machine in an Internet cafe.  See Security in A Box: How to destroy sensitive information.

Access social networking sites using https:// to safeguard your username, password and other information you post. Using https:// rather than http:// adds another layer of security by encrypting the traffic from your browser to your social networking site. See Security in A Box: How to remain anonymous and bypass censorship on the internet.

 

Always make sure you use secure passwords to access social networks and your email.  If anyone else does get into your account, they are gaining access to a lot of information about you and about anyone else you are connected to via that social network. Change your passwords regularly as a matter of routine. See  Security in A Box:  How to create and maintain secure passwords for more information.

Here are some tips from AccessNow Guide on how to create strong passwords:

  • Think of a phrase, rather than a single word.
  • Make your passphrases twelve or more characters long; this makes it harder to crack using various software programs.
  • Use a combination of symbols, numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters. One way is to include symbols and numbers for words and letters in a passphrase, which can be a saying or a line from a song or poem.
  • Don’t use the same password for every account; if your password is easily intercepted when inputted online in a place that doesn’t offer HTTPS, it’s easy to intercept your log-in information and use it to access your other accounts.
  • Change your passwords every 3 months or more often if you use internet cafe systems or computers other than your own.
  • If you have problems remembering passwords, use a secure encrypted program like KeePass to keep track of them.
  • Some accounts are compromised via lost password recovery systems. Be sure your security questions and answers for your accounts are not simple and easy to guess.

You can test the strength of your password using this online test.

Mobile phones can also have security and privacy risks.  Security in a Box has an extensive set of guides on how to make sure that your mobile phone is safe.

One of the challenges of protecting privacy and security online is that the technology changes quickly and we need to be vigilant and educated.    But the basic steps as reflected by the advice above can go a long way.

How are protecting your privacy on social networks?  What resources have you found useful?

 

Update:  Great Privacy Checklists