This lecture gives an overview of the privacy and ethical concerns related to social media.

1. Privacy &
Ethics
February 5, 2013

2. Today’s Privacy in Social Media
 Everything you do online is public
by default, private through effort
 There’s no such thing as “delete”
anymore – everything lives online
forever
 We now have to think about the
consequences of our actions in a
whole new way

3. Did You Know?
 The primary business model for most
successful online corporations is the mass
collection and monetization of your
personal data?
 All of the major social networks’ default
settings are usually public?
 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and HR people
are required to do online research about
candidates and employees?
 70 percent say they’ve rejected candidates
because of what they found online

4. Did You Know?
 The Library of Congress is acquiring - and
permanently storing - the entire archive of
public Twitter posts since 2006
 Governments all over the world are
currently considering legislation protecting
people’s online privacy
 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is
discussing providing Web surfers with a
“Do Not Track” option
 DoNotTrack.us

5. Did You Know?
By engaging in simple acts such as IMing
and Facebooking, online companies can
find out:
 Who you are
 What city you live in
 Who your friends are
 What you’re doing on Sunday
 Your psychological profile
 Your sexual orientation

6. Privacy Examples
 A 16 year-old girl in England
was fired from her office job
for complaining on Facebook,
“I’m so totally bored!”
 A 66 year-old Canadian
psychotherapist was denied
permanent entry to the U.S.
after an Internet search found
his 30-year old philosophy
journal article on L.S.D.
experiments

7. Privacy Examples
 A Google employee was
fired for illegally accessing
data in several teenagers’
accounts
 A weak password-reset
security question allowed
someone to hack a Twitter
employee’s email account
and use it to access a
Google Docs account that
contained sensitive
corporate information

8. Privacy-Related Sites
 ReputationDefender – helps you
clean up your unfairly-tarnished
online reputation
 Spokeo – scrubs the Web to publish
data about you such as your
income, political views and address
 Honestly.com – a reputation
“marketplace” where people can
write anonymous reviews about
anyone – rating people as good
employees, bosses or co-workers

9. Disconnect.me

10. Privacy’s Impact
“Social technologies are forcing us to
merge identities that used to be separate
– we can no longer have segmented
selves like a “home” or “family” self, a
“friend” self, a “work” self.”
- Samuel Gosling, U. of Texas

11. Privacy’s Impact
“In the future, Google will know so much about its
users that the search engine will be able to help them
plan their lives. Using profiles of it customers and
tracking their locations through their smart phones, it
will be able to provide live updates on their
surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to
do…Google would know roughly who you are,
roughly what you care about, roughly who your
friends are - it could remind users what groceries they
needed to buy when passing a shop.”
- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, August 2010

12. Privacy’s Impact
“The fact that the Internet never seems to forget
is threatening, at an almost existential level, our
ability to control our identities; to preserve the
option of reinventing ourselves and starting
anew.”
- New York Times, “The Web Means the End
of Forgetting,” July 2010

13. Ethical Considerations
“Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of
the vicious but has become a trade.”
– Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren (article on
privacy written in 1890 in response to the
Kodak camera and tabloid press)

14. Ethical Considerations
 Now that everything you
do can be made public
online, how will you
behave?
 How will you treat others?
 Is the “Golden Rule”
enough?
 What are the new rules of
engagement?

15. Ethical Considerations
“Today we have quick fire and semi or completely
anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses
and just about everything else. That picture of you
making out with two guys in college up on
Facebook. Or perhaps doing a bong hit after
winning a few Olympic gold medals. The random
slam against your restaurant anonymously left by
the owner of the competitor around the corner.
The Twitter flame about how bad a driver you are,
complete with a link to a picture of your license
plate.”
- Michael Arrington, TechCrunch (March 2010)

16. Parting Thoughts
“We need to learn new forms of empathy, new
ways of defining ourselves without reference to
what others say about us and new ways of
forgiving one another for the digital trails that will
follow us forever.”
-New York Times, “The Web Means the End of
Forgetting,” July 2010