Live blog from WWW2010: Publicity and Privacy in Web 2.0
I'm in the second row at the keynote session kicking off the Future Web track of WWW2010. The speaker is Danah Boyd. Topic: Publicity and Privacy in Web 2.0. This is extremely timely given the recent Facebook changes that have sent many into a frenzy, including me. I have recently coined it the Facebook New World Order. But this is a live blog. Sarcasm will be limited. My goal is to give you bits and pieces and share what I deem interesting. People are milling about and I am now feeling a bit crowded, but hey, it's WWW and everyone cares, right? Update your page periodically. If this goes over well, I will do it again in the next session about the future of social networks. BTW, the twitter hashtags are #fw2010 and #www2010.
8:57: The room is filling up. Lots of laptops in my row. Should be interesting.
9:03: Computer decided to shut down and install windows updates.
9:08: I'm back. Danah Boyd being introduced.
9:10 Danah Boyd on stage. "Privacy is everywhere. I study teenagers and often hear about privacy related to teens. " Says privacy concerns are not new. What is new has to do with big data. The web created opportunities for average people to participate in data. She is referring to the social data that marketers and researchers are currently salivating over.
9:12: "Data is cheap, but making sense of it is not." Calls herself an ethnographer, one who tries to make sense of what people do. (Hope I didn't characterize that poorly.) What gets lost in big data, she says is true analysis of what it really means. Says analyses have been about methodology.
9:15: Big data is super exciting but quality is more important than quantity. The key is to understand sampling.
9:17: Bigness and wholeness are not the same. twitter has all of twitter. People who study twitter do not have all of twitter.
If you randomly sample tweets, you are sampling public tweets. You have to know something about your data set. You can't claim that it's random if you don't know where it came from. She says big data has its limitations.
9:20 Talking about how we select friends on facebook. You can't analyze FB friends lists and say that you've analyzed their social networks. You've analyzed their Friends list. Consider the boss they've friended out of obligation but really doesn't like, and the friends they would friend but can't because they aren't on FB. Talking to someone often does not indicate close friendship.
9:22: Nobody loves big data more than marketers and nobody misunderstands big data more than marketers. If you want to work with big data you have to know the limits of your questions.
9:27: Privacy is about context, so is the interpretation of big data. Just because data is accessible doesn't mean that using it is ethical. We've stripped context out of content and this is why ethics matter.
9:31: People who share personally identifiable data aren't rejecting privacy.
9:33: People believe, even when their data is recorded, they are relatively obscure. This creates challenges when information is aggregated. People don't want everyone to access their data. They think it will be consumed by the people who deem it most relevant. They are not asking for it to be distributed and aggregated
9:35: Do we want digital papparazzi? Aggregating and distributing content out of context is a privacy violation. When you take it out of context you can easily misinterpret it. She says on some levels we know this.
9:40: People care about privacy but they also like the opportunities technology allows to garner publicity.
9:42: Moving on to Facebook. Most people do not understand privacy settings and controls. She is giving a fascinating account of Facebook history. If I can find some links to this stuff, I will share.
9:46: You should see some of the content she is showing that is public that users did not think was public. I'm talking reputation destroying type stuff!
9:48: Facebook users have become the proverbial boiling frog. (Ha, I love that analogy!)She is referring to the changes made in December as "deceptive." Also discussing how friends can leak your information. Says it was trickery.
9:50: If you knew all of the sites that were accessing your data, would you change your habits?
9:52: To the people dancing with data: Much of the data that is publicly accessible was never meant for you.
9:56: Not much time for questions. Bummer. Danah will be a panelist at another session later, but I will likely attend another. Look her up. She knows her stuff. I am packing up, heading to "The Future of Social Networks and the Web.
Angela
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