The General Intellect

this article discusses the fine that disney was just placed with for gathering information on children through their websites without parental consent.  i mean its one thing to gather information from adults, but from kids? why would a website want all of a child’s information? its uncomforting since disney is suppose to be family friendly and very reliable and trustworthy.  for it to violate online laws is very peculiar and i think its fair they got fined for it. 3 million dollars is alot, but it sets a precedent for any other childrens website to want to ask for a kids information.  it can also be argued that parents need to regulate what children do online more often.  parental controls help regulate websites but then parents should be around to see what kids do on regulated websites.  for any website, even a disney based one.

a 23 year old made a huge profit on the death of Osama Bin Laden.  as soon as he heard of his death, Maurice Harary went online and created dozens of shirts promoting his death.  at 12 dollars a shirt he sold 10,000 items by Tuesday creating a frenzy of orders.  it was a great way to take advantage of American pride at it’s highest for profit.  we all know that companies sometimes do unethical practices to turn profit, but do you think Maurice’s shirts are possibly unethical?

According to this article, social media is not the only way to go when marketing a website. Although it is a powerful tool, more “classic” forms of Internet marketing prove to be more effective, such as emailing. With all the noise that’s on the web it gets harder and harder to stand out, but when a person is emailed they are forced to at least read the sender and the title of the email, compared to a social media banner that kinda just fell to the side l! The great thing about marketing is that is constantly changing or be tweak and what not

A teen was interrogated by the Secret Service over a facebook post he made. Perhaps most disconcerning, they came to his school to interrogate him and did so without his mother present. The boy is only 13 years old. The boy made a comment that the president should watch out now that Osama bin Laden has been killed because of the potential of retaliatory strikes. However, his commented was misconstrued by the secret service to be a threat. This leaves us to wonder: does the secret service monitor facebook this cloesly that they can pick up a single comment such as this and track down a “suspect”? Did they not know the boy was 13? Do they have the right to interrogate minors and is there a cut off for when an individual is too young to be a potential “threat”? Is it is possible that facebook, along with other social media websites, work with the government to allow tracking of comments and material posted on their services?

Clearly, we need to watch what we say on the internet. Who knows who will see what we express. But what if we are too young to understand how to filter and express our comments in safe way?

In a recent article about one week ago, Facebook encountered a privacy breach. It was encouraged that all account users change their passwords yet again. According to the United States Internet Security Firm Symantec, around 100,000 Facebook applications were possibly affected by the breach. If Facebook users accounts were effected, third parties could very easily access accounts, post photos and comments on profiles and view or keep track of personal information.

The only safety zone that account holders may fall into is that most of these third parties that try to get personal information out of users must first get approved by the user. Users have to give these third party applications their permission to access information in their account. Such approvals include games, surveys, online gifts, etc. According to Symantec, Facebook made the necessary changes to prevent future leaks, but users should still change their passwords in order to prevent third parties from using the breach to access accounts.

I recently read an article on CNN.com that gave advice for the best possible passwords one might choose to use so that their chances of security breaches decrease. The advice given was to take any random long sentence and only use the first letter of each word. By doing so, hackers will find it impossible to break through your security code. The way they find passwords is by running every single word through some data base and using every possible option. Take for instance the passowrd “Iltgtc&pwmf.” You would think that it’s impossible to memorize such a thing, but if you convert it back into its original sentence “I love to go to concerts & parties with my friends,” you’d never forget it and you will never be a victim of hackers.

Check out the article link. I found it very useful! http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-06/tech/durgahee.password.security_1_keepass-common-passwords-1password?_s=PM:TECH

I’ve always heard the term facial recognition but never really thought too much into it. Recently I’ve been hearing more and more talk of it so decided to look further into this technology, especially since privacy is at a rapid decrease. Facial recognition is a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source. One of the ways to do this is by comparing selected facial features from the image and a facial database (wikipedia.com).

The executive chairman of Google warned governments against facial recognition technology.  He said it’s “too creepy” even for Google. Talk about violation of privacy. Worst off is that it is used by many social media companies. Facebook uses facial recognition programs, which allow users to tag photos of people that are uploaded to the site. iPhone 4 has a very unique way of unlocking your cell phone. Instead of typing in a password, what the phone has is the facial recognition software. I watched a small preview of it on youtube, and I have to say.. it’s pretty impressive. At least this phone will give you the option of either entering the security code or letting the phone recognize your facial features in order to unlock. Here’s a short video clip link for anyone interested. It definitely caught my attention. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUmCfe7xqBg

With all these advancements going on, I can only image what’s to come in the next 5 to 10 years.

I was recently web browsing through random online news that deals with online privacy and came upon an interesting website created by someone who is not a supporter of corporate media. The website is interestingly called FUsocialmedia.com; quite creative. It was apparently started by an online social media entrepreneur and the site is now taking over his life. So much so that his wife (or x-wife) started her own tweets about how much she hates social media because it took over her life and her marriage. She even has her own Twitter account following… http://twitter.com/#!/fusocialmedia and is not a fan!

The website’s latest post discusses how Google, Twitter, Skype and Facebook recently came together to oppose a privacy bill. The privacy bill was introduced by a California State Senator and would force sites to explain privacy settings in a very clear cut way without confusion. The senator believes that social media companies trick people into sharing too much private information. The bill is called Social Networking Privacy Act SB 242 (http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_0201-0250/sb_242_bill_20110502_amended_sen_v98.html) and would require a notice before users hand over their personal information to a site. According to this recent news article, the bill would also grant parents the right to request photos or text be removed from any of their children’s social networking pages within 48 hours. A $10,000 fine would be issued for each violation.

To any online media user this bill sounds very logical and makes common sense, but not to social media giants. Google, Twitter, Skype and Facebook claim that this bill would damage business for the California technology sector by raising costs and heavily limiting growth potential of social networking sites, as well as violate the Constitution based on freedom of speech rights.

If you ask me, these social media giants are trying to protect themselves from something that should have already been approved into action.