Chris Peterson

ChatRoulette collecting IP addresses, screenshots:

Now Andrey Ternovskiy, chief executive officer at Chatroulette has had enough.

“I believe that Chatroulette was great in the first honeymoon days after it was launched, before it was discovered by a strange people, who started to abuse the true freedom and democratic nature of the service,” he wrote on the site’s blog, upset at “difficulties raising venture capital”, dealing with “negative feedback” and doing what he could to ensure the site was still “legally operating in the United States territory.”

Ternovskiy said that he has had a “breakthrough” in dealing with these dramas by applying “the laws of a real world on an internet application.”

“We’ve started collecting information, such as IP addresses, logs and screen captures of offenders who actually break US/UN laws by broadcasting inappropriate content in a specific situations,” he said.

“We’ve captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behaviour.

“We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have.”

The end of an era. And I can’t help but feel a strange sort of pity for those who (mistakenly) thought they’d finally found anonymity in ChatRoulette, only to discover they were actually on LogRoulette.

Site here.

This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.

Click. Installed.

From AllFacebook, on a presentation by Google on a rumored new social utility:

The overall theme of the presentation was consistent: we have multiple groups and within those groups there are individuals who we have strong ties with and many more who we have weak ties with. There are also even temporary ties, like the person at the restaurant who served you food last night. While getting the system right on this is extremely difficult, the strong vs. weak ties is something that Facebook has yet to enable users to control.

…

If Paul Adams’ presentation is accepted as one of the primary perspectives of Google on social, perhaps the argument for Google’s new “Facebook killer” would be that there needs to be a more effective user-interface (UI) which helps users to control these various groups. Rather than dismissing it as a service for “advanced” users, perhaps the interface has simply not evolved far enough to give users the actual control that they want.

…

That would support the argument presented by Paul Adams in the slide below which states “If your privacy practices aren’t transparent, then you introduce doubt. Doubt leads to lower usage.” Only Facebook knows how great of an impact the latest privacy fiasco had on the company but it’s clear that Google sees this as a weakness.

If this is true, then Google has precisely the right privacy perspective to outflank Facebook on this issue. And they’re about the only company with the muscle to do it.

During the past two weeks – during which I was on a family vacation to Alaska, which is more desolate and beautiful than you could imagine – I found out, via phone, that I had achieved literary greatness: a letter to the editor published in The New Yorker.

As a newly minted and fanatical follower of Eurovision, I greatly enjoyed Anthony Lane’s piece on the contest (“Only Mr. God Knows Why,” June 28th). My only disappointment is that Lane did not mention what has arguably become the most widely beloved phenomenon of Eurovision 2010. The saxophonist from Moldova known as Epic Sax Guy entranced millions with his white Wayfarers, thrusting hips, and muscle vest. Epic Sax Guy has claimed the hearts (and perhaps the minds) of new Eurovisionistas everywhere. He is Eurovision in precipitate form, with all else boiled away until nothing is left but hips and kitsch. Long after we are dead in the ground, Epic Sax Guy’s hips and horn will be thrusting throughout the digital Zeitgeist.

For those of you who’ve missed it:

I was just elected to the board of NCAC.

From their website:

The National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of fifty-two participating organizations, is dedicated to protecting free expression and access to information by:

• Providing educational resources and advocacy support to individuals and organizations responding to incidents of censorship
• Educating and empowering the public to fight censorship
• Documenting and reporting on current censorship issues
• Expanding public awareness of the prevalence of censorship and suppression of information
• Working to influence judicial opinions about free expression and access to information by submitting amici briefs.

In light of my work (along with former ABFFE intern Alita Edelman) on mapping banned books, some current members of the board nominated me. I’ll be advising them on a variety of issues, including new media, digital native perspectives on censorship and information issues, and so on.

Excited!

From Nudge blog:

The process of mentally bucketing money in multiple accounts is often combined with earmarking the accounts for specific goals…While it seems like an inconsequential process, earmarking can have a dramatic effect on retirement saving. Cheema and Soman (2009) found that earmarking savings in an envelope labeled with a picture of a couple’s children nearly doubled the savings rate of very low income parents.

The results by Cheema and Soman could explain why some US financial institutions offer clients the opportunity to label college savings accounts with a child’s name. Saving becomes easier because the money is earmarked for the education of a specific child.

I already do this with my dozen savings accounts from ING Direct – “Car”, “Rent”, “Groceries”, “Vacation”, etc – but it’s nice to have some more empirical validation for what I’m pushing.

Two days ago, Facebook rolled out new privacy tools in a blog post by Mark Zuckerberg.

On balance, the privacy revamp represents a net benefit from where we were in the last few months. For example, Facebook has finally returned to users the ability to control basic information such as whether or not complete strangers can see your hometown.

Additionally, their new privacy dashboard (as illustrated below with a picture from the site):

Is a helpful way for people to begin to visualize what is available to whom if they select one of Facebook’s settings.

But – as is so often the question in policy problems, from health care reform to financial reform to Facebook – the question is not whether the reform is better than what we had, but actually “good enough” to be truly praiseworthy. By way of analogy, of course it’s better to throw a rope to a drowning man than to not throw one at all, but if he is 10 feet from your boat and the rope is two feet long, the effort may not be as laudable as it initially appears .

What more could Facebook have done? It could’ve made Instant Personalization Opt-In. It could’ve integrated some of the great tools like the Facebook Privacy Scanner or Zesty.ca profile mirror. It could’ve shown people what they currently are sharing and tweak it from there on the Dashboard, as opposed to simply giving them four options to pick from (although the four options are good for simplicity’s sake). Finally, it could’ve announced these changes in a big box on everyone’s News Feed – or forced them to visit the new privacy page the next time they visited the site – rather than hiding it in plain sight on the Facebook blog, which almost none of its users read.

I’m not pointing these things out just to complain about Facebook – I’m pointing them out to demonstrate how much Facebook didn’t do in their privacy reform. That doesn’t mean I don’t approve of the changes they did make – I do. But to understand the full context of Facebook’s actions, one must understand what they did and didn’t do. And in that respect, it’s still the latter that is far more striking.

There are many ways in which Facebook might know your phone number. The easiest (and most common) way is to give it to them, by including it in your profile so that your Facebook Friends can look it up when they need to give you a ring.

So your Friends have your number, but that makes sense – after all, they probably already had your number, or could’ve gotten it easily. And Facebook has your number, and while I don’t think it makes sense to “trust” Facebook anymore, I think users can trust in the fact that even Facebook is not so colossally stupid as to do something like sell your phone number to used car hucksters.

But who else has access to your number?

Think no one? Think again. Are you sure that only your Friends have access to your profile info?

What about those Groups and Events – you know, the ones that start “I dropped my phone in a pond, send me your numbers!” Have you posted in them? Do you know their privacy settings? Have the privacy settings changed since you posted?

The ever entertaining Tom Scott – creator of invaluable Internet entertainment such as StupidFight – has just produced the privacy equivalent of a horror film. It’s called – simply and appropriately enough – “Evil”.

As Scott explains:

This site randomly displays the private phone numbers of unsuspecting Facebook users.

…

There are uncountable numbers of groups on Facebook called “lost my phone!!!!! need ur numbers!!!!!” or something like that. Most of them are marked as ‘public’, or ‘visible to everyone’. A lot of folks don’t understand what that means in Facebook’s context — to Facebook, ‘everyone’ means everyone in the world, whether they’re a Facebook member or not. That includes automated programs like Evil, as well as search engines.

…

Evil uses the graph API to search for groups about lost phones. It picks them at random, extracts some of the phone numbers, and then shows them here.

Here is Scott’s screencast of what Evil looks like when it is working:

So what should you do? Scott says:

Go into all the “lost number” groups you’ve ever joined. Ever. Delete your posts. (You might want to try searching for your own phone number on Google, too; it might turn up in unexpected places.)

The thing to remember here is that the fault doesn’t lie with the users. That is to say, the fault doesn’t like with the users any more than someone can be faulted for stepping on what appears to be a solid deck only to have it collapse under their feet because it wasn’t built to code.

It is patently ridiculous and unreasonable to argue that all of these users wanted their cell phone numbers and names to be accessible to the entire Internet. But that’s what has happened, because of stupid, unsafe, and (indeed) “evil” design.

(h/t Ian Brown and PVN)

My blog is getting a lot of traffic right now from people Googling for YourOpenBook.org. If you’re one of these folks:

1) Welcome,
2) yes, I’m afraid it is that bad, and
3) here is a wonderful tool that can help you fix it (along with these).

Best of luck!

From his Op/Ed in WaPo today:

The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

…

We have also heard that some people don’t understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don’t want. I’d like to clear that up now. Many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone so people they know can find them on Facebook. We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger.

Here are the principles under which Facebook operates:

– You have control over how your information is shared.

– We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.

– We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.

– We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.

– We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

This is garbage. Facebook designs a confusing environment, intentionally removes the ability of users to make certain information private, and uses the power of the default to shoehorn users into “Instant Personalization” and other expansive programs – and then responds with a wide-eyed, “who, us?” denial and misleading protestations of innocence and earnestness.

These are crocodile tears.