Slashdot Mirror
On Social Networks, You Are Who You Know
santosh maharshi writes "On social networks like Facebook, even if you have kept your profile very private, people can just look at your friends list and infer lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn allow people to see your picture and your friends list as part of the open access for visitors (the article says that only 5% of Facebook users have bothered to hide their friends list). In a study titled You Are Who You Know: Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks (PDF), conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, an algorithm was tested that can accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users simply by looking at their friend lists. 'At Rice [University], the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year, and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy."'"
I think the point of this is that you shouldn't be showing public searchers your friend lists under any circumstances--especially Facebook.
Although for me most of the people on Facebook that I am "friends" with are people I knew in college. That doesn't necessarily mean we shared like interests, lived together or even were close. They added me and I wasn't so revolted by their existence that I said, "meh," and approved it.
As far as Twitter goes...most of the people that I follow on there are trimmed frequently. I go through and drop off the people I don't care for. I do a lot of water testing. Most of the people I do happen to follow I have never met in person nor do I plan to. I just happen to find what they say interesting whether I agree with it or not.
I guess I'm one of those people that causes this to go down to 80%.
The things they found out aren't things most people have any reason to keep secret. OK, if you see that most of my Facebook friends went to Cowpie High or Mediocre State University, and you'll realize that I, too, probably went to Cowpie High and Mediocre State. So what? Mediocre State is on my (sometimes publicly available) resume, and it's not like its any secret that I went to Cowpie High either. (and yes, the school's actual nickname among the students was that)
Much more interesting would be if they could figure things which people are trying to keep private. Where they buried the bodies of their "missing" parents, if they're gay but in the closet (I think there already was an article about that over a year ago, though), membership in the Secret Order of Inquisitors and Torturers (friending Dick Cheney is the giveaway here), etc.
Guess I'm nobody, since I have no facebook account LOL
But yeah, people shouldn't be surprised that publicly documenting every facet of your life results in less privacy, for you, and for everyone you know.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
While the study proves a fairly obvious hypothesis, what your social network could say about you could go a lot deeper than that. It's not much of a leap to determine religion, politics, sexual orientation or various other things that people don't fully consider, or could even be used to violate equal opportunity housing or hiring laws. I think there are a lot of great things about social networking, and facebook in particular, but the how it's changing cultural views and expectations of privacy is shocking and fast, and I don't think we'll have perspective on whats happening for years to come.
No wonder so many slashdotters post as anonymous cowards!
I'm sure that marketing companies have known this for years. The give-away is when they get it wrong. I get lots of adverts for cheap calls to India and for services to "send money home". I'm not Indian but most of my friends are.
This only works assuming the public use of Facebook is ubiquitous. If only half of your friends are on the network, or if only half of them allow information about them to be publicly visible, the accuracy of the predictions will suffer greatly. This in turn means that the algorithm will more accurately predict the traits of people who have the trait of not caring about their online privacy. It's a calculation based on an assumption. In other words, bollocks.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
Guess I'm nobody, since I have no facebook account LOL
You are nobody, not because you don't have a facebook account but because you just ended a sentence with an all-caps 'lol'.
Stereotypes work.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If you want to see just how much of 'you' (and anyone else in the US) there is out there for all to see, go to Spokeo and type in your name. It got my marital status wrong and had a few gaps regarding interests. But my address was on the button and it provided the view of my house from Google StreetView. Just in case I win the lottery and someone wants to kidnap me...
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
What happens in Vegas, stays on facebook
He's probably on MySpace instead.
I friended an old colleague of mine who has a prominent sales position at a tech firm, and was curious why he hid his friend list. So I browsed his news and watched his wall for ahwile and soon realized he just didn't want people to know he was gay. It wasn't blatent, but you could tell that a large number of people leaving messages were loudly gay, talking about gay iissues like gay marriage, etc..
Of course I never knew this whan I actually worked with him, and we litterally spent man weeks together at customer sites - although I afterwards realized that he was very good looking and never seemed to have a current girl friend, only talked about ex's. It all fit really.
So the article struck a chord with me.
it seems like a giant ego bonfire, it seems like a massive waste of time to tweak minor pointless trivia about your social life. just the very thought of it fills me with tedium and exhaustion. it seems to reinforce the worst aspects of people's personalities: their vanity, their shallowness, and their mediocrity. i mean who really fucking cares, including yourself, about this running narrative about the pointless banalities of your life?
and now i find the someone, in fact, does care: the demons of id theft and invasion of privacy and spam marketing... as invited into your life, by your own vanity
do the best thing you can ever do for yourself: lose facebook. don't go to another social networking site, just simply drop completely off the radar of this fad whose only value is to reinforce and amplify the worst parts of your personality, and to turn you into fodder to be harvested by search spiders and marketing algorithms
you've offered your life up to harvesting by a depersonalizing machine. grow some character by becoming real, and lose the ridiculous mask called facebook. if the lunch meat called spam became the catchword for depersonalized email message, i'd like to offer that social networking be known as soylent green: it's people! social networking sites like facebook are everyday people, ground up, processed and extruded into depersonalized marketing diarrhea: soylent green
why would you do that to yourself? teenagers: you are exempt, its a useful tool for social exploration. anyone older than 24: you're pathetic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Facebook has now changed their policy to eliminate privacy, in particular, friend lists are always public. At one time you could make this private, as noted in this report. I made my own friend list private when I first joined it, but Facebook now ignores my configuration. If you can make friend lists private, please let know how... it sure isn't easy, and Facebook's current documentation says that it cannot be made private.
Making public the private data you gave a company, without your consent, should be illegal.... but it appears that Facebook can do it with impunity. I've mostly stopped using Facebook because Facebook seems to be becoming actively hostile to privacy of any kind.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
For anyone who isn't clear on why Facebook and Twitter are so valuable, this study is yet another example of how much rich information is embedded in social network data. It's easy to imagine applications for pulling information out of social network data. Who would be interested in such data? Advertisers, ex-girlfriends, social researchers, police detectives, anti-terrorism, intelligence agencies... the list goes on and on. Pretty much any project with interests in the social world would benefit from social networking data. It's valuable. Why you would give away your social networking data to Facebook, Twitter, or Google for free?
Go to www.zabasearch.com and type in your name.
It will probably turn up a few addresses. Now all that's left is to geo-locate your IP address and dump the addresses close to that location onto Google Maps.
Even if you have an unlisted phone number your address is easy to find.
A lot of people use it when they should use *smirk*, *g*, or :) instead. It's a disease.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
You went go college and studied computer science, achieving at least an Associates Degree. You usually wear decent clothing (slacks, button-shirt, etc.) not jeans and tee shirts.
You are a sysadmin and use BSD, GNU/Linux, AIX, IRIX and SunOS/Solaris but GNU/Linux exclusively on your personal PC (but think Macs are okay and are quite capable at using them as well), think Windows OSes barely qualify for the "OS" label, know what a Vax is and even know your way around VMS, and are a first rate perl-monger.
You think emacs is of the devil and probably have many esoteric vi command keys memorized.
While you surf the intarwebs regularly you know there were tubes before webs and still read Usenet on occasion.
You are fairly libertarian but likely not a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party.
Furthermore, you are an avid reader and at one time played DOOM way too much.
Oh, and despite all this, you found someone who loved you enough to accept your marriage proposal.
I could tell you more about yourself but that's just what I got in the first 60 seconds.
I think the point of this is that you shouldn't be showing public searchers your friend lists under any circumstances--especially Facebook.
I'd say it would be better to simply avoid Facebook, Twitter et cetera altogether. No matter how careful you are with your privacy settings (assuming Facebook can be trusted), unless you are meticulous about not posting anything that you would not say ANYWHERE else, sooner or later it's likely that you will run into some embarassment or another.
I have several friends who have suffered some form of discombobulation because their allusions to defects in the character of acquaintances have been made manifest through the friends-of-friends network.
Enough for me. I'll just stay off-grid.
It's valuable. Why you would give away your social networking data to Facebook, Twitter, or Google for free?
Actually you don't give it for free---you in fact pay them for the privilege of giving them that info (indirectly, via ads). Presumably you get something in return though.
I do agree with you on the value; personal information is a commodity, and as a commodity that is inherently mine, if you want it you should have to get my consent.
A software-licensing scheme seems like the perfect solution for personal information: you only lease my information; that doesn't give you the right to resell it, you may only use it as I explicitly direct, and I can withdraw your permissions at any time for any reason.
Why, they should end their sentences with lowercase lols, like you?
My wife thought for the longest time that "LOL" meant "lots of love". I asked her one day why she signed an email "LOL, your wife". I mean, I know I'm lame but "LOL, your wife"?!!!
It does. Historically used in *actual* letters. Google results are a-plenty, and even mentioned in the first paragraph here LOL:
It's amazing how easily people forget that things existed before the Internet...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .