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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."'"
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.
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'.
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.
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?
Henry David Thoreau said it best 150 years ago:
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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. . . .