personal information

Google Street View: protecting your privacy

Posted Tue, 29/06/2010 - 18:25 by Paul

Concerns about privacy have sparked a controversy in South Africa focused on Google Street View, a visual layer which Google recently added to its Google Maps offering in South Africa and which has been available in a number of other countries worldwide for some time now.

One of the concerns about Google Street View was expressed by Managing Director of MUA Insurance, Christelle Fourie, who stated that Street View infringes on people's right to privacy. I don't necessarily agree with Fourie. Privacy and Google Street View is largely a question of when people have a legitimate expectation of privacy. If the Street View cameras only present imagery of views that are publicly available, there may not be a legitimate expectation of privacy and no invasion of privacy.

As its name suggests, Google Street View gives you a view of addresses you can find in Google Maps from a street level.

View Larger Map

In the past, using Google Maps would give you the sort of map you see above (this is a map to our offices). You'll notice that in the map view below, there is a yellow man icon in the zoom controls.

Dragging that yellow man to a location on the map will give you a street level view of that specific location. Once in Street View mode you can move around, zoom in and out and get a better view of whatever you are looking for. You may also discover that there is imagery presented in Street View that concerns you. It may be imagery of your home or just something that bothers you. Google gives you a way to report a problem or concern to Google. To do this, look for the link at the bottom of the image:

Clicking on that link will take you to a form you can complete to report your concerns to Google:

I have also prepared a quick video tour of Google Street View and a demonstration of how to report a problem to Google:

Privacy is about choice

Posted Mon, 07/06/2010 - 09:15 by Paul

The recent controversy about Facebook's privacy settings and the (once again) updated privacy controls highlighted both misconceptions about what privacy is and what it isn't in the context of the social Web. The new controls are aimed primarily at making managing Facebook privacy settings a little easier to manage. This is about being able to control -

what personal information is published;
how much personal information is published;
where your personal information is published;
who can see which personal information; and
how long that personal information is made available.

Privacy has become more about informational self-determination - each person's ability to decide what becomes of their personal information. Facebook has been a bit of a cowboy with users' personal information for some time now and the primary concern, as I see it, is that Facebook has decided, from time to time, to expose more of users' profile information to the public Web and make that level of disclosure a new default. It has also progressively changed its privacy policy to allow for greater transparency. What it has done is severely limit users' choices to the point where their choice has become whether to include information on their profiles or not, bearing in mind that any of their personal information could suddenly be made public.

A number of the Web's more prominent pundits seemed to focus on the "privacy as secrecy" issue and missed what I believe is the more important point: privacy on the social Web is about choice, not secrecy. I talked about what I called the "privacy myth" in a post I published last year where I explored this idea in some detail. Its worth repeating a point I made in that post here:

In this context, privacy online becomes an exercise of identity management rather than a question of total control. When it comes to identity management the emphasis shifts from controlling whether and how much personal information is published to asserting a claim over personal information about you in an effort to create a more cohesive and accurate identity online. One of the reasons to do this is to reduce the risk of identity theft by providing a readily ascertainable body of information that represents you and which you have asserted is about you. A good example of a service that helps people do this is ClaimID which gives users an opportunity to state which websites, services and published information is linked to them and how.

When it comes to "privacy as secrecy", users' choices become pretty binary: either publish information or don't. Facebook has taught us that even the biggest social services can be untrustworthy and any personal information you publish can be exposed when the company changes its policy. Of course that personal information could also be exposed through glitches, caching services, profiling efforts and aggregation services and functions. The point is that anything published online can be made more public than you may have wished or intended so a wiser approach is to decide, in advance, which personal information absolutely can't become public and that personal information must never be published online. This sort of personal information may (and arguably should) include the following:

your home address;
your childern's school;
your identity number (although disclosing full birthdays erodes this); and
credit card and other sensitive banking information.

Beyond that personal information which you hold most dear, you should assume that everything else could be made public without your specific consent and without you being made aware of it. That isn't to say you shouldn't still take advantage of your preferred social service's privacy settings - you should.

FB privacy controls.png

Make a point of investigating these privacy controls. Ideally they should be intelligible, subject to clear privacy policies and guidelines. Facebook has failed here too with an overly complex privacy policy and privacy framework. It is trying to remedy this with its new Privacy Guide but I wonder if it isn't adding more layers of complexity. Facebook, and perhaps other social services, has a vested interest in exposing as much personal information as they can. It increases the value of the service to other users. Imagine how appealing Facebook would be if you couldn't find your friends because their basic personal information was restricted from public view. These interests can often be at odds with users' preferences so it becomes really important to make sure you understand the relevant privacy controls and adjust them to suit your preferences.

The time may come when users' choice is whether to remain on a social network or not. A number of people publicly terminated their Facebook profiles recently after the controversy following the F8 conference. I was tempted to delete my profile too but the problem with that is that doing so would remove you from one of the biggest social ecosystems online today. Facebook reportedly has around 500 million active users. That is a powerful network to be part of and removing yourself from it altogether is a pretty drastic step. That said, Facebook still has a long way to go to regain users' trust (mine included) so the prudent course of action is to be more guarded about what you publish and how public you make that information.

Fortunately the new privacy controls do seem to give users more control over their personal information. That level of control extends to personal information Facebook previously deemed to be public by default as well as applications which can access users' profile information. It was an important turning point for Facebook and a healthy reminder that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know best. Users are the best arbiters of how their personal information should be handled and what should be done with it. Services like Facebook shouldn't interfere with users' right to choose. Doing so makes profound inroads into users' privacy.

Image credit: "Is this how the web looks to Facebook?" by Robert Scoble, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

We're scaling back our Facebook activities

Posted Wed, 12/05/2010 - 10:15 by Paul

If you've been reading my posts recently you are aware of (and perhaps share) my concerns about Facebook's inroads into users' privacy and, specifically, erosion of users' choices about how public or private their personal information should be. The growing privacy trend may well be towards greater publicity as Mark Zuckerberg has contended but its not for Facebook to unilaterally make these profound decisions for their users. Robert Scoble, a well known Web maven, recently wrote about how he wishes Facebook were more open. He lives his life in public and that is an intriguing way to live your life but he misses the point. The more I think about it the more I believe that the fundamental problem with Facebook's approach to privacy is that it disregards its users' right to choose their level of exposure to the public Web.

Facebook's representatives talk about how their are making it easier for users to connect to each other, share things with each other and find content customized for them through the recently announced Open Graph API. What they don't talk about is the labyrinthine privacy controls which include loopholes enabling friends to share your profile information outside your own privacy settings or how the new panels users are presented with to authorize connections to their Facebook profiles are all-or-nothing options. Faced with these panels, users are probably more likely to agree than they are to refuse access and in the absence of a degree of granularity in their choices, Facebook's personal information grab progresses.

There is growing dissatisfaction with Facebook's privacy moves as more and more people explore the ramifications of Facebook's developments (take a look at the headlines Jason Calacanis lists in his post on this topic). A number of relatively high profile individuals are publicly disabling or even deleting their Facebook profiles as a result. The challenge is that Facebook is so big that removing yourself from its ecosystem means opting out of a significant community of users. That can have an impact on a business that uses Facebook to promote itself.

We discussed our Facebook page internally and the extent to which we promote that page to our clients and followers. Facebook represents a noticeable traffic source to our main site but our reservations about Facebook require us to give careful thought to how much we promote our page. We've decided to retain our page and continue posting our blog posts to the page as a distribution channel. We'll also retain the "Recommend" button on our sidebar for the time being. We have removed the "Join us on Facebook" link we had in our main menubar though. It may not seem like much of a change but it is a start as we further evaluate the merits of remaining on Facebook. One reason to retain a presence on Facebook is keep our page open as a channel for our posts in which we highlight the risks of using Facebook.

The question whether to maintain a presence on Facebook is a difficult one and until their is a comparable alternative, it remains a challenge.

Did you know your friends can republish your private Facebook information?

Posted Tue, 04/05/2010 - 16:23 by Paul

I just came across a set of privacy settings in Facebook I wasn't aware of before reading this post by Gina Trapani titled What Private Facebook Information Your Friends Can Publish:

"Just because you've set your Facebook profile to 'Friends only' access doesn't mean someone who is not your friend can't see it. One of the most confusing aspects of Facebook's privacy settings is an area where you specify what information your friends can share about you through applications and web sites, even parts of your profile you made private."

What is scary about this is that these settings control how much of your private Facebook information your friends can share, seemingly independently of your privacy settings. For example, one of the options is to share your status updates. My status updates are restricted to "Friends" but enabling the "Status updates" share option in these friend share settings would give those friends the ability to re-publish my status updates to their friends and whoever else can access those updates through my friends' profiles.

FB friend shares.png

These settings potentially make a mockery of your privacy settings by creating a workaround that enables people who do have access to your private information to grant access to people who don't. It is essential that you take a look at these specific settings and change them to match your preferences for direct access to your profile if you are particular about who gets to see your Facebook information.

While you are at it, why not audit all your Facebook privacy settings?

Facebook passes the privacy ball to developers

Posted Thu, 29/04/2010 - 11:33 by Paul

Changes to the Facebook Platform for developers

I’ve written about the legal labyrinth developers for Facebook’s Platform must navigate in a previous post. Facebook has outlined its changes to the Facebook Platform for developers in its post titled “A New Data Model”. The post describes the changes to Facebook’s Platform from behind the scenes. There are a number of interesting changes which are concerning.

Generally speaking Facebook is putting some distance between developers and users. Its new approach is summed up in this paragraph from the post:

These changes reflect two core beliefs: first, user data belongs to the user; they should have transparency and control over it. And second, you should be able to build relationships with your users; we should not be in the way. We hope these improvements will foster more trust and engagement for our platform and the applications and websites using it.

By putting some distance between itself and users, Facebook doesn’t have to take responsibility for errant developers who abuse the new levels of access they are being granted to users’ personal information. On one hand it probably lightens the administrative load on Facebook to keep a watchful eye on the Facebook Platform ecosystem but it also gives Facebook an excuse when a user’s personal information is abused: its not Facebook’s job to manage a user’s relationship with the developer. The hope is that developers will conduct themselves responsibly but there have already been instances of developers who have abused the system and misused users’ personal information through their applications.

For starters the permissions developers require from users to permit social applications and socially aware websites to access users’ profile information are not as granular as they were before Facebook shifted away from its previous Facebook Connect approval and authentication model. One of the changes is that instead of being required to approve a series of requests to reference different aspects of a user’s profile, all the necessary permissions are collection in a single dialogue:

While this certainly makes obtaining permissions from users a lot simpler for developers and gives the appearance of a simpler approval mechanism for users, it removes the option of allowing access to some parts of a user’s profile and not to others. Instead, using a social application or socially aware website becomes an either/or option for users: either they grant all the permissions requested or they don’t benefit from the social functionality of the site or the application.

Facebook has also removed the 24 hour retention limit on some profile information which, coupled with increased profile publicity thanks to changes to profile publicity in December 2009, increases the risk of users’ personal information abuse. Developers still require users’ consent to access and store their personal information and if they obtain explicit consent, they will be able to do more with users’ profile information than simply display it back to them. As a starting point developers will have access to users’ User ID, name and email address and, thanks to Facebook’s real-time updates, developers will also receive updates when users change their profile information which they have given developers access to.

One of the challenges with this degree of data retention and Facebook’s hands-off approach is that users will have to take greater responsibility for managing their profile information (as much as they can, Facebook has already decided that some profile information will be public by default and the majority of users are not savvy enough to change those defaults where possible). Another challenge is that developers are expected to publish privacy policies for their applications and websites and give users an option to delete their personal information. This is particularly concerning because once the information has been passed along to an unscrupulous developer, you can’t unscramble that egg.

These are just overviews of some of the implications of the new Facebook Platform. There are even more privacy concerns and a marked absence of adequate answers. As has become its habit, Facebook couches these changes in user friendliness and convenience terms which disguise the underlying threats to users’ privacy in the hope that more people will drink the Koolaid than will question its motives.

Complying with privacy law

As I mentioned above, Facebook requires developers to make sure they comply with applicable privacy laws. In South Africa developers should anticipate the Protection of Personal Information Bill which is making its way through Parliament. This legislation, when enacted, will likely require developers to publish a detailed privacy policy describing what personal information they will collect from users and what they intend doing with that personal information. I wrote about the essential requirements of a privacy policy in a recent post titled “Privacy policies that don’t suck”. The key issue there is to obtain informed consent from users to collect that personal information and process it in the manner the developer intends. Depending on what personal information the developer intends collecting, specific consent to collect personal information for a specific session may also be required.

To add to all of this, Facebook’s global nature may also necessitate that developers factor in privacy laws in other countries and regions. The European Union has a fairly developed body of laws and regulations dealing with data collection and privacy and developers may need to cater for these rules as well.

This is one of the challenges of Facebook shifting the responsibility for how developers interact with users’ personal information to the developers. Developers not only need to take care to comply with Facebook’s own policies but they also have to cater for privacy laws which may impact on their applications. For users the challenge is managing their personal information better on Facebook and taking care not to give permission to collect and process their personal information without first taking the time to understand exactly what will be done with it. This decentralised approach opens the door to even more abuses and users will be left picking up the pieces while Facebook shrugs its shoulders.

Facebook, the privacy fiend

Posted Wed, 28/04/2010 - 16:50 by Paul

Facebook has become a privacy fiend in recent years. It seems to make a habit of taking steps that outrage privacy advocates while imposing its perception of how users should share their personal information in such a way that best advances its interests. I should probably point out that Facebook’s privacy moves are generally made within its privacy policy’s parameters. The changes to its privacy policy from time to time are made by consent (you agree to changes when you agree to Facebook’s terms).

The problem with how Facebook approaches privacy. What it does is as follows:

Facebook makes determinations how users should be sharing their information or what the current trends are;
It then changes its privacy policy and terms of use to achieve these perceived changes to how personal information is handled; and
Facebook then opens users’ personal information up by default to align with its determinations of what the trends are or how it believes we should handle our personal information.

They did this in December when Facebook opened up sections of users’ profiles to the public Web by default, leaving them with a set of deceptively labelled privacy controls to approve or change. The majority of users simply approved the settings and, in the process, opened up far more of their profiles to the public Web than they did previously.

So what happens now? Christina Warren at Mashable explained the following in her post titled “Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy”:

I took a look at the different documentation of the Open Graph API and the different social plugins, and gathered that the data collection and overall privacy settings don’t differ from what has already been available. Again, what changes is how that data can be displayed to different people and how it can be integrated in different ways.

Nevertheless, it is imperative that users who have concerns about privacy make sure they read and understand what information they are making available to applications before using them. Users need to be aware that when they “Like” an article on CNN, that “Like” may show up on a customized view that their friends see.

Public no longer means “public on Facebook,” it means “public in the Facebook ecosystem.” Some companies, like Pandora, are going to go to great lengths to allow users to separate or opt out of linking their Pandora and Facebook accounts together, but users can’t expect all apps and sites to take that approach. My advice to you: Be aware of your privacy settings.

What isn’t yet clear is if there will be any granular permissions for public data. For instance, I might want to share that I “Like” a CNN.com article with a certain group of people, but not make it public to my entire social graph. For now, users need to assume that if you do something that is considered public, that action can potentially end up on a customized stream for everyone in your social graph. (emphasis added

As Leo Laporte pointed out on This Week in Google 39, Open Graph starts to mean your online life is an open book to Facebook. Facebook introduces some pretty far reaching and invasive tracking tools under the guise of increased ease of use and deployment of open apis and technologies.

There is a flip-side to this: these new developments make it easier to users to see what their friends are doing and find interesting. There is some value in that as well as the potential for sites users may never have visited before being customised when those users arrive on the site for the first time.

The fundamental difficulty I have with Facebook’s approaches to users’ personal information is that the company is arrogant enough to use its policy framework to force its users to expose their personal information however Facebook wants it exposed so it can pursue its agenda further. It has no sense of responsibility for the trust its 400+ million users place in it or for the tremendous amount of knowledge it has about us. Facebook abuses its users as if it has a Divine right to do so. Google blundered when it exposed too much of its users’ personal information recently when it launched Buzz but Google had the humility to acknowledge it had made a mistake and took almost immediate steps to address users’ concerns. Facebook manipulates the permissions users gave it when they signed up to reshape the privacy landscape on the Web. True the company is changing the way we relate to each other and the Web (largely due to its sheer size) but Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to be too concerned about the cost.

Facebook strips users of even more privacy options

Posted Tue, 20/04/2010 - 16:19 by Paul

Facebook is becoming synonymous with forced publicity and a flagrant disregard for users' control over their personal information. It is also changing the way that large providers like Facebook and Google will treat users' personal information. It is almost trite that privacy as in secrecy is pretty much over for anyone who is active on the social Web. It sounds harsh and a little outrageous to make that statement (I'm not the first) but it is an uncomfortable truth. At the same time a new approach to privacy has emerged in the last couple years which could be the next best thing: privacy as in users' control over their personal information.

In a world where real secrecy online doesn't really exist, control over how much personal information to expose to who becomes really important. Meaningful control over your personal information is also referred to as "informational self-determination" and it is central to decent privacy policies. Facebook has made a number of changes to how it is handling users personal information and it has done so under the guise of giving users more control over their personal information. This is just insidious. What Facebook regards as more control over users' personal information is really a series of changes to privacy setting defaults and controls that appear more user friendly but really detract from the level of control users enjoyed previously. The last round of privacy control changes, for example, changed privacy defaults to "Everyone" for a range of personal information categories. If users weren't careful they would have exposed far more of their personal information to the public Web than they may have been comfortable with previously.

All of these changes are made under the auspices of Facebook's privacy policy which is amended using a curiously deceptive practice of being more transparent about the changes. Facebook publishes the proposed changes to its terms, the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, and gives users an opportunity to comment. Here is how it works:

13. Amendments

We can change this Statement if we provide you notice (by posting the change on the Facebook Site Governance Page) and an opportunity to comment To get notice of any future changes to this Statement, visit our Facebook Site Governance Page and become a fan.

For changes to sections 7, 8, 9, and 11 (sections relating to payments, application developers, website operators, and advertisers), we will give you a minimum of three days notice. For all other changes we will give you a minimum of seven days notice. All such comments must be made on the Facebook Site Governance Page.

If more than 7,000 users comment on the proposed change, we will also give you the opportunity to participate in a vote in which you will be provided alternatives. The vote shall be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote.

We can make changes for legal or administrative reasons upon notice without opportunity to comment.

So users have an opportunity to comment on proposed changes but if the number of votes on the proposed changes don't meet the "30% of all active registered users", the vote won't be binding. Bear in mind that there are ~~450~~ 400 million users and while not all of those users are "active registered users", 30% works out to a lot of votes! The current draft privacy policy and draft Statement of Rights and Responsibilities don't seem to have nearly enough votes or comments to meaningfully influence the amendment process. This means that these proposed changes will likely be implemented and users can expect even more of their personal information to be exposed publicly based on Facebook's determination that people are and should be more public.

Users will now find that much of their personal information is becoming publicly available, whether they like it or not. What does "publicly available" mean?

Publicly available information includes your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages. This information makes it easier for friends, family, and other people you know to connect with you.

Publicly available information is visible to people visiting your profile page, and Facebook-enhanced applications (like applications you use or websites you connect to using Facebook) may access this information. It does not allow people without Facebook accounts to contact you.

The latest changes also introduce a new way of handling your interests. According to the Facebook blog:

More Connected Profiles

Some of you added information about yourself, such as your likes and interests, favorite books, music and movies, when you first joined Facebook. But we've noticed that more than three times as many of you have connected to Facebook Pages, such as those for bands, non-profits, universities or anything else you care about, as a way to express yourself. So to make it even easier to display your affiliations, we've improved the profile.

Now, certain parts of your profile, including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests, will contain "connections." Instead of just boring text, these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you.

Here's how it works:

Opt-in to new connections: When you next visit your profile page on Facebook, you'll see a box appear that recommends Pages based on the interests and affiliations you'd previously added to your profile. You can then either connect to all these Pages—by clicking "Link All to My Profile"—or choose specific Pages. You can opt to only connect to some of those Pages by going to "Choose Pages Individually" and checking or unchecking specific Pages. Once you make your choice, any text you'd previously had for the current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile will be replaced by links to these Pages. If you would still like to express yourself with free-form text, you can still use the "Bio" section of your profile. You also can also use features and applications like Notes, status updates or Photos to share more about yourself.

This may not seem like a problematic change but it could be for someone who has interests that they may prefer to be kept relatively secret or at least limited to a smaller group of friends (take a look at the EFF's post about these changes).

Another controversial change is Facebook's plans to work with content providers it has pre-approved to share your personal information with them. What will happen is that you will see content more tailored to your preferences or profile when you visit these sites and will have to opt-out if you don't want to be greeted with this level of customization. This has attracted some attention and Facebook responded as follows:

We also received questions about the proposed new language in the Privacy Policy relating to our plans to work with some pre-approved partner websites to offer a personalized experience when you arrive at these sites. Based on your comments, we think it's important to clarify a couple of points, even though this program has not yet been launched or even finalized.

First, it's important to underscore that this will be a test with a handful of carefully selected partners to provide express personalization on their sites. These partners will be pre-selected, reviewed, and bound by contracts with Facebook – much like other partners we have worked with in other contexts to deliver unique and innovative experiences. For example, we're working with Yahoo! to integrate Facebook across their properties, AOL to integrate our chat with AIM, and we first partnered with CNN.com to make their broadcast of the Presidential Inauguration more social with the launch of the Facebook live stream application.

In addition, partners who participate in this test will be required to provide an easy and prominent method for you to opt out directly from their website and delete your data if you do opt out. There will also be new features on Facebook.com to help you control your experience when you visit these sites.

In sum, the core idea behind this test is to work with partners to enable them to present you with a better, more relevant, and tailored experience when you visit their sites. While we have not finalized these features or partnerships, we think this is an exciting opportunity to make surfing the web a smoother and more engaging experience for people who use Facebook.

Again, this may give rise to an improved experience of those sites for many but what about Facebook users who don't want their profile information to be handed to these content providers? What about users' choice whether to pass that information along like they have with the current Facebook Connect option many sites implement? Facebook has decided (or perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 20-something leader has decided) that we should be more public with our personal information and it is forcing a change in our habits to make the social Web fit this determination. I don't know about you but I object to that as a user and as a lawyer despite how public I am online. I want to have a choice what I want to share and what I want to keep private.

Instead we have posts from Facebook telling us how much better we would be if we shared more with other people and if we used Facebook more to do just that. This sort of thing sounds a lot like propaganda to me to support someone else's decision about my personal information.

I keep thinking back to that line in Spiderman where Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker that "with great power, comes great responsibility". Facebook has more than ~~450~~ 400 million users. If Facebook was a country it would be bigger than the United States in terms of population below China at 1.3 billion people and India at 1.2 billion people. There are more than 1.5 billion people using the Internet. Facebook's users make up just less than a third of that number. By any measure, Facebook controls a significant number of people's personal information and rather than taking steps to protect its users who should be given meaningful control over their personal information, Facebook is adopting a very paternalistic approach to this and is making these decisions for us based on a consent we gave to a previous version of its privacy policy and terms (yes, this is a direct consequence of you just checking the "I agree" box and signing up with Facebook in the first place - how is that for the power of a site terms and privacy policy?). If this doesn't scare you, it should.

So what are the options? Opt out of Facebook? Perhaps but given Facebook's size and growing influence on the social Web that could be the equivalent of opting out of society and heading for the hills. Another option is to remove the personal information you don't want shared but that would just detract from your profile's value to your friends. It is a difficult dilemma for many.

The bottom line here is that Facebook does not respect its users' right to determine what is done with their personal information on Facebook, especially where those users don't want a stripped down Facebook experience.

Privacy policies that don't suck

Posted Fri, 16/04/2010 - 17:49 by Paul

I came across a few intriguing posts by Aza Raskin about privacy policies recently. Raskin was recently appointed the Creative Lead for the Firefox browser and is a design and user interface expert.

Raskin published a series of posts on his blog about privacy policies and an interesting initiative to make them more accessible, intelligible and meaningful for site visitors. As he points out -

Privacy policies are long legalese documents that obfuscate meaning. Nobody reads them because they are indecipherable and obtuse. Yet, these are the documents that tell you what’s going on with your data — how, when, and by whom your information will used. To put it another way, the privacy policy lets you know if some company can make money from information (like selling you email to a spammer).

At the same time privacy policies are essential documents. I've written about them and privacy issues generally a number of times on this site and about why they are essential now and going forward as we see new privacy legislation take shape here in South Africa and in other countries and regions. Anyone following the debate about the new Consumer Protection Act here in South Africa will be familiar with the plain language requirements in the Act which require that contracts be drafted in plain language. This is an accessibility requirement. It is practically a cliche that contracts are complex, couched in legalese and largely unintelligible to clients and lawyers alike. This is because the lawyers who draft those contracts are not basing their language choices on improving accessibility.

The same principle should apply to privacy policies. These documents must be intelligible to any person with reasonable intelligence and a grasp of the policy document's language. The primary reason for this goes beyond accessibility to the something even more important: informed consent.

A privacy policy's role, as I see it, is to give users/visitors enough information about what personal information is collected from them and what is done with that personal information so those users/visitors can make an informed decision whether they agree to that. A user can hardly be said to have agreed to having her personal information collected and processed if she didn't understand and agree to what would be collected and what would become of that personal information. I would even go so far as to say that the absence of informed consent could even negate a privacy policy.

Raskin looked to the Creative Commons model which uses a series of icons and symbols to indicate that the content owner has granted a certain license. Why icons and other graphics? As Raskin explains -

The visual schematic language is a descriptive way of explaining a privacy policy and helps us to understand what’s going on underneath the hood. It doesn’t solve the problem of being able to quickly figure out the guarantees a privacy policy is making on your data.

There are four elements which can be used to create six standard licenses, each of which is identified by a badge which identifies its components. This site, for example, uses a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives 2.5 ZA license. The badge for that license is as follows:

Its components are the "Attribution" and "No Derivatives" elements. Visitors to this site are greeted with this simple license indicator and if they click on the badge they will be taken to a plain language summary of what the license entails. It is certainly a lot simpler than navigating a custom content license.

The possible solution Raskin offers to address comparable privacy policy complexities is a series of symbols which would highlight certain features of a site's privacy policy. Just as there are legalese versions of all Creative Commons licenses (no escaping some degree of legalese, unfortunately), sites would still have a privacy policy but it would also make use of a series of icons to point out certain features of that policy. One of the questions he asks is whether these icons should highlight features of a privacy policy like the Creative Commons licenses or whether they should point out certain practices like sharing personal information with third parties or the degree to which users have control over their personal information.

The work towards this sort of privacy iconography is far from complete but it got me thinking again about how to improve accessibility for documents like privacy policies and even website use terms. Although a number of firms and businesses are jumping onto the plain language bandwagon, there are good reasons for the requirement. Thinking a little differently about these sorts of documents could go a long way towards improving accessibility, intelligibility and, ultimately, enforceability. That is the key issue for providers. These documents have little value as collections of words on a page. Their real value lies in how effective they are when the proverbial poo hits the fan.

Image credit: Privacy, health, fears over airport X-ray by publik16, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 2.0 license

Modified controls give Buzz users better privacy options

Posted Mon, 15/02/2010 - 07:18 by Paul

As I pointed out in my previous post, there has been quite a bit of concern about Google Buzz's defaults and their implications for users' privacy. Fortunately the Gmail team (Buzz is part of Gmail) has been pretty responsive and has made a series of changes to Buzz in the few days since its launch. The Gmail team published a post on 13 February 2010 announcing further changes to how Buzz operates. The first change affects the auto-following behaviour many people are/were concerned about:

First, auto-following. With Google Buzz, we wanted to make the getting started experience as quick and easy as possible, so that you wouldn't have to manually peck out your social network from scratch. However, many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people. This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile.

On Thursday, after hearing that people thought the checkbox for choosing not to display this information publicly was too hard to find, we made this option more prominent. But that was clearly not enough. So starting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-suggest model. You won't be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked "Follow selected people and start using Buzz."

Gmail contacts.png This change will affect new users as well as existing users who will be shown a similar set of options and given another opportunity to confirm the people they are following. Other changes include optional connections with Picasa and Google Reader (despite those services only feeding public content items) and a new Buzz tab in Gmail's settings which will give users another way to limit friend list displays, Buzz's visibility in Gmail and even an option to disable Buzz completely. When it comes to restricting access to your stream to specific people, you should take advantage of contact groups in Gmail's contacts.

This method still requires you to set up your contacts lists or groups to take advantage of them but you can specify which groups of people can receive your Buzz updates. One way you would limit who receives your posts is by making your posts "Private" in Buzz and selecting specific contact groups. I haven't quite set up my contacts lists completely but here is an example:

What is not immediately apparent is how to block existing followers or set default post publicity/privacy levels if you are already using Buzz. When it comes to blocking existing followers, the option to block existing followers is accessible through the "XX followers" link (note the checkbox at the bottom that affects follower lists visibility):

The changes do address many of the concerns raised about Buzz but their benefits for existing users may be somewhat limited. New users can look forward to a very different initial experience with Buzz and far more control over their stream's privacy (or publicity, for that matter) and who can view their content. We've seen a number of changes in the last few days and it is clear that Buzz, like many early-stage Google products, is a work in progress. We will likely see further improvements and enhancements as Buzz becomes available to more and more users and is extended to Google Apps. At that point the product becomes a sort of enterprise product as it becomes available to Google Apps business users.

If you are interested in using Buzz, take the time to explore the various privacy settings and controls and make sure they are set to levels you are comfortable with. It will be worth it going forward if you decide to use Buzz as an extension of your social presence.

Google and the privacy Buzz

Posted Fri, 12/02/2010 - 18:35 by Paul

Google Buzz launched a couple days to quite a bit of interest and speculation from a number of people, myself included. If you don't know what Google Buzz is, watch this short video before you continue reading:

Buzz is Google's long overdue social network/framework. Google has had social elements for some time now (the Friend Connect panel in the sidebar to the right is a good example of one of these elements) but Buzz is the first real service that starts to tie Google users' social experience of the Web together into a relatively coherent service. I am pretty excited about Google Buzz, myself, partly because I see it as a real alternative to Facebook and the growing privacy fiend Facebook is becoming. I also prefer Google services because of Google's efforts to be more transparent about and help users safeguard their personal information. That being said, Buzz has launched with a few poor privacy-related decisions.

For all the excitement about Google Buzz, there are a number of privacy concerns about the service because of the way that it works, particularly when you first add Buzz to your Gmail account. One of the major concerns is how Buzz automatically adds users as their contacts' followers and vice versa. To add to this, followers and people you are following is visible by default in your Google profile, your focal point of your Google Buzz experience. This default visibility setting is reminiscent of Facebook's decision to expose users' profiles and content to the public Web recently and an observer would have been excused for thinking that after that hubbub, Google would have made different choices. Update: The Gmail team has made a further set of changes to Buzz which address a number of these concerns. Take a look at my follow-up post for more information together with a couple tips you may find useful.

Another concern is that using a Google profile as a Buzz user's identity exposes the user's email address to anyone paying attention. This is problematic for people who prefer to keep their email addresses private. Molly Wood published a post titled "Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare" highlighting these and other concerns the other day. Her post is worth reading. It also doesn't help that, by default, Buzz updates appear in your Gmail inbox and can clog it up pretty quickly (Lifehacker published a post with directions how to keep your Buzz updates out of your inbox). Its safe to say that Google Buzz got off to a somewhat rocky start.

Unlike Facebook, the Gmail team took notice of the feedback it received about these and other issues and published a post yesterday about a few changes they have made to Buzz and its various notifications:

1. More visible option to not show followers/people you follow on your public profile
If you don't want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can always opt out during the profile set-up when you first use Buzz or at any time from the edit profile page. We are making this option more prominent in the set up process, to ensure everyone who wanted to hide these lists can do so easily.

2. Ability to block anyone who starts following you
We are making it easier to block anyone, by adding "Block" links to the list of people following you. Previously, you were only able to block people from following you after they had created a public profile. Now, you can block anyone, regardless of whether or not they've already created profiles for themselves.

3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile
Initially, we showed you a list of all the people who would be following you once they created a public profile. However, only those contacts who had already created a public profile would show up on your public follower list. We're making this clearer by explicitly distinguishing which of your followers have public profiles and will show in your public list of followers. With this change you'll be able to see who is on the public list of followers that everyone else sees.

Of course it is also a good idea to read the privacy policy that applies to Google Buzz because that is the legal framework that governs Google's use of your personal information. The Google Buzz Privacy Policy is meant to be read with the Google's general privacy policy and really highlights privacy information specific to Buzz. Like a number of better policy documents published these days, the Google Buzz Privacy Policy is written in plain language. There are a couple points to note when reading the privacy policy:

In order to use Google Buzz, you must have a public Google profile that contains your first and last names at a minimum;
When you first use Buzz, Google selects contacts for you to follow based on who you email and/or chat to the most (big takeaway here is that Google knows who you are most frequently communicating with although it is unclear where this knowledge resides and how accessible it is);
Your name, photo and followers lists will be displayed on your Google profile which is, in turn, publicly searchable (the policy later specifies that you can "opt out of displaying the list of people you follow and people who follow you on your Google profile");
You could be associated with your contacts if they follow you or if you follow them by virtue of their publicity settings;
Private postings could become semi- or completely public if you add participants using the "@ reply" convention Buzz uses for replies to other users because this mechanism works like a "reply to" setting in your email;
You have the option of posting publicly or to more private contact lists.

It is also important to bear in mind that Google Buzz ties in with other Google services you may be using including a pre-existing Google Profile (Google integrates your contacts/follower lists from services you add to your Google Profile into Google Buzz). If you choose to add other social services to Buzz, public postings to those services will appear in your Buzz stream (there are real-world implications for these posts privacy sensitive users should be aware of).

At the moment Buzz is limited to Gmail accounts but it will soon be extended to Google Apps accounts (basically, people who use Google Mail and other services in conjunction with their domain names). This means businesses, schools and non-profits will soon have Google Buzz as an option where those organisations use Google Apps as their outsourced infrastructure. I imagine that when this happens, the administrators of those accounts will have to add Buzz as an available service before it becomes available to users. It will presumably still be an opt-in service at that point too.

Google Buzz is a significant social service because of which company created it and the stakes involved. Google's primary competitor in the social space is Facebook which, I believe, now has over 400 million users.

As Google Buzz develops it will either gain substantial traction or become another mildly successful Orkut, in the process giving way to Facebook. If Buzz does gain real traction and begins to compete effectively with Facebook it will be crucial that Google handles the enormous amount of personal information it gathers transparently and in a manner that protects its users rights. The alternative is a social Web dominated by Facebook and Facebook doesn't exactly have a sterling record when it comes to personal information.

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