BAD BAD BAD BAD. Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites

Facebook will be moving forward with a controversial plan to give third-party developers and external websites the ability to access users' home addresses and cellphone numbers in the face of criticism from privacy experts, users, and even congressmen.

Facebook quietly announced the new policy in a note posted to its Developer Blog in January. It suspended the feature just three days later following user outcry, while promising that it would be "re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks."

In response to a letter penned by Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) expressing concern over the new functionality, Facebook reaffirmed that it will be allowing third parties to request access to users' addresses and phone numbers.

Facebook noted that it is considering implementing controls that would more explicitly highlight the personal nature of the information being transmitted to applications and explained it is "actively considering" whether to restrict users under 18 years old from sharing their contact information with third-party developers.

"We expect that, once the feature is re-enabled, Facebook will again permit users to authorize applications to obtain their contact information," Facebook's Marne Levine, vice president of global public policy, wrote in the letter to Reps. Markey and Barton. "[H]owever, we are currently evaluating methods to further enhance user control in this area."

Facebook has attempted to tread a fine line with regard to privacy issues even as it has continuously pushed users to share more information, both on Facebook and beyond the social network.

The plan to open up users' address and phone numbers to third-party sites and services marks the latest frontier in Facebook's often controversy-fraught efforts to encourage users to be more liberal in sharing their data and online activity.

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Even if the revamped feature were to include improved notifications and protections for minors, privacy experts warn the feature could imperil users' personal information and increase their risk of being targeted by scams, spam, and identity thieves.

Though Facebook prohibits applications from selling users' information or sharing it with advertisers and data brokers, malicious, rogue apps spreading phishing scams and other ruses are not uncommon on the social network. With just a few errant clicks, an unsuspecting user could potentially hand over her home address to a scammer peddling diet cures or free iPads in an effort to compile credit card data and other personal information.

"[Scammers] might be able to impersonate you if they had your phone number," said Norman Sadeh-Koniecpol, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. "They're saying, 'Please give us your phone number,' but they're not telling you whether they'll share it or whether they'll sell it or use if for malicious purposes. In fact, you don't know who you're dealing with."

Others are concerned with what they see as Facebook's willingness to change the rules of play--first encouraging people to share personal information with a more limited group of friends, then allowing that data to be accessed in new, unexpected ways.

"People never thought when they were posting this data [such as their phone numbers] that it would be accessible to anyone but friends. There's a real mismatch of expectations around that," said Mary Hodder, chairman of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. "Even if Facebook comes back with new protections, they're still saying, 'Hey, get over it, your data is public.' I feel sad for users that Facebook's approach is 'You give us anything and it's all fair game.'"

Despite the social network's intentions to make addresses and phone numbers accessible to developers, Rep. Markey offered Facebook measured praise for its response, while stressing the necessity of protecting younger users.

"I'm pleased that Facebook's response indicated that it's looking to enhance its process for highlighting for users when they are being asked for permission to share their contact information," Rep. Markey said in a statement. "I'm also encouraged that Facebook is deciding whether to allow applications on the site to request contact information from minors. I don't believe that applications on Facebook should get this information from teens, and I encourage Facebook to wall off access to teen's contact information if they enable this new feature."

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Get ready for the Oscars!: "TV Industry Taps Twitter and Facebook for Viewers' - NYTimes.com

By the time the first ballot is opened at the Academy Awards next Sunday, millions of people will be chatting about the awards show on the Internet. And ABC will be ready.

Trying to exploit viewers’ two-screen behavior, the television network has built a companion Web site with behind-the-scenes video streams, so Oscar winners will be seen accepting an award on the TV set, then seen celebrating backstage on the stream.

Experiments like this one are a sudden priority in television land. As more and more people chat in real time about their favorite shows — on Facebook, Twitter and a phalanx of smaller sites — television networks are trying to figure out how to capitalize.

It’s as if people are gathered around the online water cooler — and the television executives are nervously hovering nearby, hoping viewers keep talking and, by extension, watching their shows.

Read the full article on NYTimes.com

Amazing Project! LOVE this: Covering Marines at War, Through Facebook: Teru Kuwayama and the Basetrack Project

Excerpt:

"Basetrack is a Web-based reporting initiative with the photographers Teru Kuwayama, Balazs Gardi and Tivadar Domaniczky. Its “forward crew” is embedded with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines in Afghanistan. The rest of the team tracks regional news and relevant information, adding it to material transmitted from Afghanistan. Michael Kamber spoke with Mr. Kuwayama last month. Their conversation has been edited and condensed.

A. "When this Marine officer asked me, “Will you be with us for this whole tour?” my first instinct was, yeah, that’s fascinating. But my second was: yeah, I’ve been doing this for I don’t know how many years and I don’t even honestly know who’s going to care. What do these pictures actually accomplish? Who cares about 1,000 Marines?

You can pinpoint a cluster of people who care. We create a pipeline between 1,000 Marines working in very austere, isolated conditions in southern Afghanistan and connect them to their mothers, their fathers, their wives, their girlfriends, their husbands and their kids. Nobody has more authenticity to talk about this war, its costs, its consequences, and maybe even offer some analysis about how this could be done better. That’s effectively what the project is. The stream of photographs we send out is embedded with news articles, bits of analysis, facts, figures. And it is going out on Facebook.com/basetrack.

Q.
So people can access it through Facebook and leave comments?

A.
There’s a wall they can write on. This is actually the most interesting thing to me. We don’t have an unlimited budget to run a satellite transmitter and send out pictures every day, so we’ve actually uploaded very little content. What is happening pretty fast is that the mothers, girlfriends, husbands, etc., started searching for pictures of the Marines and then posted them on the Web site. So the site generates its own content now.

Q.
Is this the new journalism?

“You constantly hear these lamentations about the death of journalism. It doesn’t look like that to me. It looks like the birth of journalism.”
— Teru Kuwayama
A.
This is a question of how you define journalism....

Read the full post:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/covering-marines-at-war-through-face...

Clever Social Game: James Patterson: Catch A Killer Now Available On Facebook - P

Press Release via pc.ign.com

SAN DIEGO - Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) today announced that the new free-to-play puzzle adventure game James Patterson: Catch a Killer (http://apps.facebook.com/catchakiller/) is now available on Facebook. Combining the thrilling content of best-selling author, James Patterson, with the interactivity of Facebook, the social game features Patterson's most popular character to-date, Alex Cross. By deciphering puzzles, players use technology and skill to help the forensic psychologist hunt for justice.

In the game, players can search for clues and hidden items in gritty crime scene photos, and unearth the terrifying truths behind each clue by piecing together fingerprints or unlocking DNA sequences. James Patterson: Catch a Killer also features a virtual world where players can interact with friends and invite them to play the game, gift items and publish achievements in their News Feed. Energy packs and other in-game items can also be purchased through micro-transactions using Station Cash®, SOE's virtual currency, to help in solving crimes.

"We have an incredible relationship with James Patterson and worked closely with him on the development of this game to explore interesting and creative ways we could approach his unique way of storytelling within a Facebook game environment," said John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment. "Fans of James Patterson and crime dramas will enjoy James Patterson: Catch a Killer as it combines social gaming with the mystery and suspense of a Patterson novel to deliver an interactive and entertaining gameplay experience."

"Sony Online Entertainment has delivered a really unique online crime drama experience," said Author James Patterson. "I think fans of Alex Cross - and of crime stories in general - will really get into the experience of becoming a detective and solving mysteries online."

Features of James Patterson: Catch a Killer include:

  • Play Free or Upgrade: James Patterson: Catch a Killer is a free-to-play game, but players can further enhance their gameplay by unlocking new cases and purchasing a variety of items through micro-transactions.
  • Solve the Puzzle, Crack the Case: Search crime scenes for evidence, examine clues, piece together fingerprints and match DNA to unlock secrets, advance gameplay and get closer to solving the case.
  • Unique Enemies: Players will chase unique criminals inspired by James Patterson, such as The Changeling, Ladykiller and Anniversary Killer.
  • Gritty, Realistic Graphics: Mature and edgy graphics depict gruesome scenes equivalent to what is featured in the Alex Cross novels and on crime TV shows.
  • Immersive Virtual World: Create an avatar and chat with friends in the James Patterson: Catch a Killer city. Swap tips, gift items to friends or just brag about your sleuthing skills.
  • Customization & Achievements: Advance through the game earning or purchasing special elite items that can be displayed or gifted to friends.

For more information, visit www.PlayCatchAKiller.com.

About Sony Online Entertainment
Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) is a recognized worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online games, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers around the globe. SOE creates, develops and provides compelling entertainment for the personal computer, online game console and wireless devices. Known for its blockbuster franchises and hit titles including EverQuest, EverQuest II, Champions of Norrath, Untold Legends, PlanetSide, and Star Wars Galaxies, as well as the recent kids' phenomenon Free Realms, SOE continues to redefine the business of online gaming and the creation of active player communities while introducing new genres on all entertainment platforms. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, with additional development studios in Austin, TX, Seattle, WA, Denver, CO, and Tucson, AZ, SOE has an array of cutting-edge games in development across various platforms and genres for audiences of all ages.

 

 

LIKE: Ex-Googler Brian Kennish Helps Users Disconnect From the Social Web

Kennish released Facebook Disconnect in October and the extension quickly gained popularity, hitting the top 10 list of Google Chrome extensions. He told us that he quit his job at Google three weeks later so that he could "develop tools that make it trivial for the average user to understand and control the data they share whenever they browse or search the Web." He said that he thinks Google is "collecting more personal data than any other company" and "to fight for user privacy while working there would've been impossible."

disconnect-screen.JPGDisconnect, similar to his earlier project, blocks a number of third-party widgets from sites like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo, as well as de-personalizes search at the cookie level, allowing you to remain logged-in to services like iGoogle or Gmail without having your search queries attached to your Google profile.

Kennish said that, while the tool is in a primitive state, he hopes it will have a larger effect on the debate over privacy on the Web.

"Realistically, Disconnect won't have a significant direct impact on the average user's privacy -- Adblock (and I mean the whole suite) is the most successful browser extension and used by less than 1% of the Web population," said Kennish. "So government policy and what browser vendors ship natively is more important to me. I'm hoping to show a better way through software and have a butterfly effect on policy and browser implementation."

Kennish calls the "Do Not Track" method of opting-out "a bad model for defending online privacy because phones ring and get your attention, where Web bugs are invisible and go unnoticed."

Indeed, last summer one online advocacy group released a browser extension that alerts you "whenever your personal information is being sent to Google servers." The result was a near constant barrage of alarm bells - if your phone rang this often, you would go insane. Disconnect takes a less obnoxious method, showing a running tally of how many calls have been blocked in the extension's toolbar icon. Clicking on the icon also allows you to quickly allow for unblocking because, no matter our privacy talk, these tools are also useful in our online lives and not always unwanted. Kennish's point is more that the user should be allowed to opt-in, rather than needing to opt-out - an oft-heard refrain in online privacy discussions.

Kennish said that he started with blocking standard third-party social widgets "because I consider them the most dangerous third-party resources and there didn't seem to be another tool that blocks them out of the box. The prevalence of these widgets means they can report on almost all your browsing activity, which can then be linked to databases full of the social data you intentionally share."

While Disconnect may be in early stages and not have a "significant direct impact" for the average user, the tool could be useful for those concerned about how different social tools are keeping track of your browsing habits. The extension is available for both Google Chrome and RockMelt.

Amazing & Beautiful: The World’s Facebook Relationships Visualized [PIC]

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Paul Butler's description:

“I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.”