Alex Barnett blog : privacy

Facebook export - WTF????

alexbarnett — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:55:00 GMT

On hearing the news over at TechCrunch that I'm able to export my social network data out of Facebook as a .CSV file using the FriendCSV app, I did exactly that.

I have 74 contacts on Facebook but I managed to export 144 records. That's 70-odd people's "social data" including education, work experience, current location, hometown, affiliations, date of birth of people I don't know. Like Justin over here, I seem to have more "friends" than I bargained for. And I've now got their data.

This is not good. Facebook - wtf is going on????

Update: Dan Birdwhistell, developer of the FriendsCSV app, commented below soon after I posted to explain the issue I described above was NOT the fault of Facebook but an issue with the FriendsCSV data processing side of things:

"Hey Alex. I just posted this on Techcrunch as well. WTF is right, but this very unfortunate glitch has been fixed. Here's what happened: After valleywag, techmeme, digg, etc. all picked it up, the server got overwhelmed and we had around 25 dumps that were in queue. FB times out after a few minutes, so to speed up with the dump, we added some threading to the libraries, which pushed the exports through in an instant, but also misplaced some of the data in what we now know to be at least four separate csv dumps. When we were alerted to this, we removed the threading and all was right again; however, the error did occur and it was our fault. We'll continue to test the app during the night just to make sure this doesn't happen again. "

Deepest apologies that this happened."

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly Dan. Here's the thing though - you have shown how easily all this data can be extracted - that's a good thing, and well done for bringing our attention to that, but you have also shown how wrong it can go - that's the bad thing. It's small scale in this case but you've highlighted how this can go bad in a more general sense.

I've been very supportive of the "my data" efforts, however my support has been based on the presumption that I'm actually talking about "my data", not somebody elses. This real-world example has opened my eyes to the fact that opening up social networks / social graph will be a complex business and fraught with possible downsides.

At large scale, the ability to extract all my social graph data - as opposed to "my data" which I provide permission to an application - begs the following question: who's data is my social graph data? It is each individual's, or is it mine once Jo Smith has allowed me access to it?

Privacy Policies should have RSS feeds

admin — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 21:57:00 GMT

James Governor and Kevin Murphy both agree: site Privacy Policies should have RSS feeds.

Absolutely.

MSN Search Champs Podcast - Privacy conversation

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:43:00 GMT

I attended the MSN Search Champs today....and what a day. Given the recent news and concerns around the data MSN Search, Yahoo and AOL provided to the government, there was a session set up where the 57 bloggers / online experts at MSN Search Champ were invited to discuss the topic with senior MSN management (Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi and VP Chris Payne).

As Robert Scoble wrote, MSN VP Chris Payne took the opportunity to confirm that no IP address or PII (Personally Identifiable Information) was provided. It became apparent to me at least, that many (maybe the majority) of the MSN Search Champs didn't realize this prior to today's event. I think this misundertanding is one of the reasons there was such a deal and story made front page news in the media and in the blogosphere.

And so conversation started.

And it carried on into the night, even after the event was over - here's a podcast (mp3, 42 mins, 10mb) recorded tonight to discuss what we heard and learnt today. We had five Web 2.0 Workgroup members on the podcast: Fred Oliveira (post), Dion Hinchcliffe (post), Joshua Porter (post), and myself. We also had Chris Pirillo, Thomas Vander Wal of Infocloud the organizer of MSN's Search Champs, Brady Forrest.

Michael Arrington, Richard MacManus and Live Side have some info on their first day at MSN Search Champs.

download the podcast (mp3, 42 mins, 10mb)

Update: Thursday 26 2006: One point of clarification since the podcast was provided to me by Ramez Naam, director of program management at MSN Search: the DOJ did not ask MSN for PII specifically. They asked for MSN Search logs. MSN told them that they would not give them PII and they were fine with that.

The major push-pull between MSN / DOJ was in the amount of data - they asked MSN for a much larger volume of data, and it was scoped down to a relatively small period.

Tags: Microsoft MSN Google Yahoo privacy

Attention Podcast with Joshua Porter

admin — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:05:00 GMT

This is a two part podcast with Joshua Porter.

Part 1: 43mb, 45min

Part 2: .46mb, 48min

Joshua is a little faint to hear at first, gets a bit better later though, sorry about this.

Part 1 Notes and Links

Turkey, Black Fridays and Boxing Days (intro)
J Wynia's OPML Sampling, attention engine (01:35)
Memeorandum, the echo chamber (04:45)
Shelly is a she (!) (05:40)
Ed Batista on Attention Trust (07:15)
Attention Trust and Root vault (09:00)
Why do we need a third party, why do we need attention brokers? (11:04)
Dave Winer, Danny Ayres, Raymond Kristiansen, Attention.xml, OPML, Attention RDF, microformats (14:40)
Nick Bradbury, Steve Gillmor, AttentionTech podcast
All those RSS users and they don't know it (18:00)
OPML, attention data sharing (21:00)
What did you learn about Chris now you have his some of his attention data? (23:00)
Self-reported attention (27:00)
OPML wishlist: it's my wishlist (30:20)
Mortgage brokers is making money from my attention - attention brokers (32:55)
Why I don't like Attention recorder (37:00)
My wife is an attention data nightmare (40:00)
empowering customers (41:30)
Attention, Buying a Car, and Control - why am i not in control - ? (43:20)
End of part 1 (45:10)

Part 2 Notes and Links

We've already got some feedback to the first half/part of the podcast. In particular I wanted to highlight Danny Ayres who took the time to post this comment. Thanks Danny, we should keep talking.

As I listened to the recordings to make the notes below, I came realise two things: Firstly, how much work is still ahead of us to work it out in this attention management space (but it will be fun - and of course, it'll never end....). Second, it appears that a non-trivial convergence is occurring, one that James Governor recognises and describes as a "quadrangulation of SSE, attention, RSS and OPML that creates the opportunity, no?".

In the meantime, Dave has pointed to Jeff Jarvis' demand to Yahoo! that they hand over his attention data (RSS)!

Back to the podcast: again, Joshua's voice is relatively faint (compared to mine) but it is audible - sorry about this.

Notes and links below.

Anonymous e-commerce (intro)
Identity 2.0, (02:10)
Why should I trust Microsoft with my attention metadata? (04:10)
Kim Cameron, InfoCard, and Identity Metasystem (07:56)
Anonymous personalization (10:45)
What social model fits here? (14:40)
My OPML as my attention data (18:00)
Have you been to a casino lately? (20:05)
Solove's The Digital Person, Orwellian futures, little brothers, and Kafka's The Trial (24:30)
Minority Report, The iris as a cookie (28:08)
Will we have OPML spiders here soon? (29:00)
Feed ranking in readers, OPML as expression of your attention, Attention engines (30:32)
Users will drive the future of OPML (31:30)
Google Base, user-defined schemas, structured blogging (33:25)
user hacks, emergent standards, emergent tags (36:00)
Ajax, Aflax, Flash-based data visualization (40:45)
Hacking is really the only way to innovate, 45:00
End (47:50)

Tags: A ttention, OPML, RSS, attentiontrust, attention.xml, podcast