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Google Researchers Warn of Automated Social Info Sharing
holy_calamity writes "Researchers from Google have written a paper about how social networks can undermine privacy. The most interesting scenario they discuss is 'merging social graphs' — when correlating multiple social networks makes it possible to reveal connections that a person has intentionally kept secret (PDF). For example, it may be possible to work out that a certain LinkedIn user is the same person as a MySpace user, despite their attempting to keep their profiles separate. The Google solution is to develop software that screens new data added to a social network, attempting to find out if it could be fodder to such data mining."
What do you expect?
Wasn't there a data-mining incident where Netflix "scrubbed db" and IMDB was combined so that users were uniquely identifiable? I mean, if enough information was mined, how many unique people would we come up with?
Google and all the others are just putting the screws where they would logically tighten. It's as much google's fault as it is everybody who holds individuals data (and google probably does so much more securely).
how many people will be surprised about Google being the champion of privacy?
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...
you take pains to keep your social site stuff disjoint - I don't care if someone correlates my plaxo/linkedin profiles - both are my real name, but a myspace profile will have no coworkers on it. I can just talk to them, anyway.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I thought Google would be the ones undermining privacy in this case...
1's and 0's should be free.
just watch what you post online about yourself cuz ultimately it is similar to posting your information on a bulletin board but Globally
In other news, Google reports they're working to eliminate your privacy even more!!! :)
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
This is a case where multiple pieces of information, that individually do not compromise one's privacy, can actually do so when aggregated and correlated together.
This sort of pattern is why something like Google Street View subverts the privacy laws that we have. Yes, a photo taken from a public location of things viewable from that location, by itself, does not violate privacy, and privacy law has been developed so that each individual photo that Google takes and publishes does not, on its own, violate anybody's privacy. What the law fails to capture is that putting a vast number of such photos together, correlating them with a geographical information system, yellow page listings, satellite imagery, internet search results, and offering it to the general public to use for free, without any restrictions of purpose, does massively violate privacy. So the standard response to privacy challenges to Street View ("the law allows you to take photos of any public place you want") just massively misses the point.
Are you adequate?
Just look at any long thread here on Slashdot and you see a pattern of convergence to a disgruntled, socially frightened, and overworked IT/programmer guy named Anonymous Coward.
On second thought, looks like that applies to most other UIDs here as well. ;-)
On a more serious level, makes me wonder. If such a tool was used to narrow down a suspect in a crime or malfeasance, would constitutional guarantees against self-incrimination come into play? Could one argue that intentional postings of information pseudo-anonymously are implicitly protected from meta-analytical incrimination?
Not that I have any thing to, umm, hide, mind you....
While that is a completely fair thing to point out, there is a very important thing that it misses: other people can put information about you online, without your permission, and that information is just as subject to analysis as what you put up.
The two best examples that come to mind right away:
Notice that both of these acts are perfectly legal, and while the second arguably should be regulated and restricted by law (the aggregation, correlation and publication parts, not the picture-taking part), the first one ought not to.
Are you adequate?
same old phony FUDge, different packaging. we used to call it pr firm generated hypenosys.
So Google is telling us they're going to data-mine social network profiles and use software to match people up?...is it me or are they doing exactly what they were saying is a security threat.
I don't have a LinkedIn profile. I had a MySpace, but I killed it. My Facebook account does have political rants and opinions, but I don't have any pictures that could prove embarrassing. Google my name, and you'll find political rants I've posted on Yahoo! Groups and similar.
However, I currently have something that can't hold a candle to being careful on Facebook: an employer that doesn't care what I do off the clock. As long as I stay out of trouble with the law and notify my employer if I'm moonlighting, all they care about is that I show up for work and do my job. Should I get on-call duties in the future, I'll be held to a written SLA, and as long as I can respond to calls within an allotted time, they don't care what I was doing. I can even apply for other jobs without fear.
I used to be a K-12 teacher--if you ever think you're being spied on off the job, just be glad you're not a teacher.
- Twice, I was indirectly threatened with termination for looking for other jobs.
- The local newspaper photographed a teacher with a group of animal-rights protesters when the circus came to town. Parents started complaining to the principal saying they didn't want their children in that teacher's class.
- Some students found a picture online of a naked woman who closely resembled--but wasn't--a high school teacher. They took the picture to the school's principal, and the teacher wound up having to defend her teacher certification against revocation--fortunately, she won. I'm not even sure if there's a rule against teachers posing naked, as long as it doesn't directly involve students.
Granted, should I ever find myself looking for a job, a potential future employer might Google me and decide that I'm too liberal (or too something-else) to work there. But the question here is: do I really want to work somewhere they hold employees' personal, legal, off-the-clock lives under a microscope?
Google warning of privacy issues is like an arsonist holding a can of gas and a lit match shouting FIRE in an already burning theater.
Some sites like Amazon merge a mini-social site into their main commerce site. By merging who we know with what we purchase, a system could divine quite a lot. It might be able to divine that you are looking for a job, cheating on your spouse, etc. Or it might be able to spoil something innocent like the fact that you are planning a surprise trip to Disney World for the Family.
My only hope is that there will be ways around this. A popular stance defending this lack of privacy is "if you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?" I am of the opinion that it is okay to have something to hide. It is important that we be able to sneak around. Yes. I do have something I would like to hide, and while I'm not all that *worried*, there are certain people whom I'd prefer not know certain things about me.
Maybe I'm paranoid. But I really think they're simply out to get me.
This is a "duh" moment.
Have they had their head under a rock since 2002?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Since the inception of the web, I have been wondering how much longer privacy could last.
People who have grown up with the web tell everything about themselves freely on sites like MySpace. I don't know if this is because they are just stupid from youth or if it is a different paradigm than the old folks had.
But in any event it is clear that privacy is diminishing rapidly. Look at cameras. Everyone carries a camera in their pocket now. Anyone can set up a wifi-connected miniature webcam with very little effort or cost. It's not even very difficult to listen through walls (or especially windows) nor to see at least heat traces through walls. And of course, there are satellites watching everything we do at least outside of walls.
Then think about things like grocery store cards, credit cards, online accounts... And how many people here use a plethora of Google accounts with the blind faith that a mere slogan (Do No Evil) will somehow protect their privacy? Really?
Then think about how cheap data storage is and how everything is not only logged but archived. It might not be used today, but it can be accessed ten years from now, or twenty, or fifty. After all, computers of a decade from now will be able to eat petabytes like Tic-Tacs.
Expecting to maintain an old-school sense of privacy is probably not realistic in this, um, brave new world we live in.
Boulder-based TechStars hatched a company that exploits this concept as their singular revenue model--they worked deals with all the major social sites from facebook to twitter. Cross-licensing deals that involved sharing information about users, their "friends" and groups they belong to or share with (and what they share), in order to obtain the right to extract the the information from providers in real-time.
AOL bought SocialThing last fall for an undisclosed sum.
They've ALREADY opened Pandora's box, now they're trying to get some publicity on how they can fix the problem they (at least helped) create.
I don't hate Google, I think they tend to go "Oh, cool, we can do this!" without thinking through the implications of it... much like other clever people in history have done.
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
But that's the whole point: the picture of your house, taken from a public road, as one isolated token of information, does not posit much risk to your privacy at all. Tons of individual people in our society own cameras, and take photos in public places that depict other people's property, and everybody agrees that the owners of said property should not have a right in general to prevent others from taking such photos. The privacy laws we have are built to protect individuals' rights in that sort of isolated case.
The problem is when a corporation starts taking such photos systematically, aggregating them all together and correlating them with other systematic data sets. In that situation, a photo that just happens to contain your house is no longer just that; it's a piece of information that can be used to access many other pieces of information that may allow somebody to infer facts about you that you would rather prefer they couldn't.
Google Street View is only the start. Just wait for the day when digital cameras commonly include GPS units and automatically tag each photo with a precise location and time, which can then be cross-indexed with a geographical information system like Google Maps. I can imagine it already: your wife carelessly forgets to close the window shades one day when they're changing. A neighbor takes a photo of her naked, and posts it to 4chan. Thousands of folks copy the photo all over the web. The photo has GPS information in the EXIF tags. Creepy /b/tards start stalking your wife. You give a resume to a potential employer with your residential address in it; they look up the address in Google Maps, click on the link to show image search results taken nearby, and are treated to a naked picture of your wife.
That's an example where the photo in question is probably illegal to take, but other examples may be concocted where the picture, by itself, is fine. The point of the example isn't the photo; it's how the technologies that we have today for associating one item of information to others make it too easy for people to find out more about you than they should be able to.
To sum up, the privacy laws we have today are laws that were designed to protect people's privacy in yesterday's, pre-computer world. Because of this, they primarily address things like whether somebody had the right to take a given individual photo, and not whether somebody is empowering others to infer facts about you by correlating many individually innocuous items of information.
Are you adequate?
Wow. I hope my Facebook girlfriend doesn't find out about my MySpace girlfriend.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Don't create accounts for all these social sites in the first place. They're largely a waste of time and a hollow attempt to massage our own egos anyway.
So Google is writing software to discover cross social network links, to protect us against cross social network links.......uhhh....yea its ok, they're not evil.
neorush
Just don't put crap on the web that your boss/wife/mother/ex-girlfriend/lover shouldn't see. duh.
Fuck privacy!
"by Anonymous Coward"
There is nothing that will stop more and more information from becoming available, and for bots to start correlating and finding their context. Google is doing just what is expected of them within the natural evolutionary path of data organization. Sure, one can regulate google, but nothing will stop others from creating tools that do the same thing. And this is only the beginning.
There is only one solution. And that is to be able to actively monitor, control and protect information availability. And this must include the ability to delete information from places where the information is not desired. I have to be able to tell facebook to delete all of my information, and facebook needs to be legally liable if found they fail to accomplish this task. Archival without permission will also have to be illegal.
It is all or nothing. Either everyone will have information about everyone, or no one will have anyone's information unless permission granted.
Of course, these measures are only necessary for humans. Places, things, facts, public figures, etc... Everything else will clearly benefit from correlations being automatically compiled and made freely available.
Google suggests that posting your personal information on the internet, even across multiple sites can make you susceptible to data mining.
Ok. No argument there.
To remedy this, they propose to mine your data, presumably archive it for future reference, and finally politely report back how successful they were?
Hmm...They've definitely identified a problem.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
> The Google solution is to develop software that
> screens new data added to a social network,
> attempting to find out if it could be fodder to
> such data mining.â
And it's safe if Google does this because they'd never like sell the result or give it to the gub'mint, unless, um, well, ....
Equivocation is the new evil.
This may be the best common ground. The internet made "leveraging the genius" the thing of the 2nd decade (give the world another year to rest & prepare).
Now all any organization has to do is locate one of some 10,000 people worldwide with the knack at seeing ultra-patterns. Most of us aren't that interesting to bother with, so a little camoflage to avoid 5 second name searches is usually enough. But what the real point of the Mrs. S. effect is, "if you annoy the collective Net, they'll borrow a pattern expert and pulverize you".
Web 2.0 and 2.1 are about Sharing.
Web 3.0 and 3.11 will be about privacy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You mean John Tiberius Smith or such.
You're advocating "security through noise". Doesn't work. That means John Smith will have a tough time *denying* anything ugly that one of the other John Smiths did.
"Oh, that's not me ... I only have a Google mail and a Kentucky Friends profile... uh... I think I need to watch that James Duane video again."
Basically we're hosed, and the next 10 years will see us grinding out the implications. Problem is, society moves like molasses, though I think the collective pace has accelerated with the advent of the web.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Google Researchers Warn of Automated Social Info Sharing"
Ooh that sounds good. I guess it sounds better than "Ad broker leads attention away from automated harvesting of private information, by PR initiative." Or, a child molester who issues warnings about abusive parents.
I never use my real name or location, etc for "fun" things. I know a lot of people are backwards and don't think about (or care about) personal freedom outside of work so you gotta do things like that.
That's one tired, old argument.
When you uploaded the picture to Facebook you gave them rights to re-publish it even in hard copy media so you did formally publish the photo and label with Joe Smith's name. That contract between you and Facebook eliminates any distinction between example #2 and example #3 no matter how much you wish one existed.
Pretty soon, politicians would have grown up online. So how would this change politics?
Well, if your running for President of the United States, your rival candidate will eventually be able to look at your Internet records - EVERYTHING you've ever posted on the Internet - to dig up dirt on you. Weather it be an embarrassing photo taken from your MySpace profile, a far-left or far-right wing statement you made on an IRC channel or politics chatroom, Internet and privacy right now will eventually change politics.
I try to keep my main online username separate from my usernames on certain websites. Usually I use the same username for everything, but sometimes I use different usernames. For instance, I'm a furry. When I created accounts on numerous furry forums and sites, I specifically used a different username, to make it more difficult to connect my regular username with these sites.
Now imagine if I, a furry, were to run for President in 15 years. And my rival candidate put those two usernames together.
This is why Batman never blogs.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Posting your whole life on the interwebs has nothing to do with naivete or generational values. It has to do with peer pressure and impulsivity.
The most outlandish and transparent people in any peer group are the ones who talk about their whole life on whatever, whether it be the web, or usenet, or a ham radio network, or a town hall meeting. A portion of those who are affected by an outlandish person will seek to emulate him, when they perceive his forms of expression as yielding a net profit, usually in the form of increased social currency. They will justify to themselves that "there is nothing wrong with it."
This is how an ugly man can have a pile of gorgeous women: he gets an outlandish attractive woman to socially proof him in front of other women. This triggers a curiosity-envy-jealousy scenario among the women. The increased investment that these women now put towards accessing the man increases the man's intrinsic worth -- whether or not he "deserves" it, and whether or not those women even like him.
In short, people can be inticed to do almost anything through modeling and peer pressure.
And there I was spending so much time trying to figure out how to create links in Facebook to all of the better social networking sites that I actually use and have meaningful posts on.
The best I could come up with was a "note" to add links to my LJ, Slashdot, OKCupid (it's more than just a dating site, dammit, or at least it used to be a lot geekier), etc. profiles. Of course, no one visiting my Facebook profile can actually see the note unless they're explicitly looking for it.
Anyway, I highly recommend this post to anyone else who's trying to mash up their various social networking sites:
http://zarfmouse.livejournal.com/264655.html
It doesn't really help your Facebook friends find your useful blogs, though.
Anyway, if someone could help me find a guide to mashup Gallery2 with LiveJournal, Flickr, YouTube, etc., I'd appreciate it. My goal is to have most of the posting of my blog entries, pictures, and video with geolocation tagging hosted on my personal Linux server, but then automatically uploaded / posted to the various external sites to leverage their community, comments, etc.
I'm waiting for 3.11 for Workgroups.
I'll get my coat.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.