Is there anything in your Facebook past that might shock other people?

The new Facebook timeline feature has thrown up some interesting situations that you, as a user, might want to have a bit of a think about when it comes to privacy. While the new layout of your previous activity might be a nice trip down memory lane for you, it’s also a pretty easy way for other people to look way back in time to what you may have been doing in your younger, wilder days.

Okay, Facebook isn’t really that old, but how much can people change? When you consider that Generation Zero was university students and we’re now 6 or 7 years on from there, the change can be quite measurable. Back then it was still essentially a ring-fenced network – only members of certain institutions could sign up. Parents and bosses (if you had them, bearing in mind it was student-only for a time) weren’t on Facebook, so it was pretty much a free-for-all with regards to what you could get away with posting ‘for the banter’.

Once you leave college or university and start seeking gainful employment, your perspective on many things starts to change. What you choose to post on Facebook is one of them. It’s not unheard of for employers to take a look at candidate’s Facebook profile to see whether or not they think they’d be an asset or a liability for their company – do you think that law firm you are applying to will be stoked to see pictures of you passed out in a student flat, covered in UV paint after “the most legendary night ever”?

Everyone is young once, and what they’re doing is perfectly appropriate behaviour at the time – I’m sure that even the most well-heeled, middle-aged city-slickers in their 3-piece pinstripes had their fair share of similar nights. They might even have a certain degree of sympathy for the fact that the world we live in today where almost every step is documented is vastly different to the one when they lived out their halcyon days. However, it’s a risk that would be well worth negating.

But there aren’t just professional implications to consider. Back before Facebook Messaging was introduced the only way to communicate with people (on Facebook) was to write on their walls. If I can borrow this example from Stephanie Buck, “the new Facebook profile, however, gurgles your exes back to the surface of a soup that may be bitter to begin with”. With the new timeline feature, your profile has now become a very public ‘scrapbook’, all of your exchanges with previous squeezes are within easy reach of your current girlfriend, and if she has even the slightest tendency to put Bugs Bunny on the stove, your past – however innocent it may be – will have the potential to come back to haunt you.

Now, I didn’t mean to go scaremongering for half a thousand words, but rather give a heads-up before people get royally screwed by the latest changes to Facebook. In Stephanie’s article on Mashable that I mentioned earlier there are some useful tips about how you can trim the fat on your timeline and prevent any potential disasters from happening.

Facebook are at the centre of some rather alarming allegations about the use of tracking cookies to gather information about what web pages a user has been visiting, even after they have logged out of their account.

Naughty naughty...

This latest privacy misdemeanour saw the social networking giant confirm that it has been constantly tracking its 750 million users as they browse other sites across the web, not just pages on Facebook. They did however say that this was just an innocent mistake, honest guv’nor. This error saw software that is automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they login to Facebook ‘inadvertently’ sending information back to the company.

These dubious practices were uncovered by Australian technology blogger Nik Cubrilovic, and the revelation has predictably evoked an angry response across the web. The question of privacy when Facebook is involved is somewhat of a minefield. The social network gets a lot of flak for sharing too much of the information that you post onto the site, when in actual fact a lot of it is user error for not reading and adjusting the privacy settings appropriately. Sometimes they introduce features that are conceived with the best intentions, yet they are met with a serious backlash (the new ‘frictionless sharing‘ springs to mind), but then there are instances like this, that might be the last straw for a lot of people.

Whether the collection was intentional or not, it is believed that the data harvested by these cookies could make targeted ads on Facebook much more accurate, and as such increase the value that can be attached to the prime advertising real estate on the site. It must be noted that the advertising line of thought is conjecture, based upon what the data could be used for. Facebook have thanked Mr Cubrilovic for alerting them to this issue and have stated that they have since fixed the issue and the cookies in question no longer send information once you have logged out. A Facebook spokesman also added that they “do not use this information to target adverts”.

Facebook announced some pretty big changes last week in terms of what we share, how we share it and who we share it with. There was also a change to the aesthetic layout of the social network and with the new timeline feature people will now know more about your habits and whereabouts.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although by making information easier to share, Facebook may have opened the floodgates for people to be publishing content that they wouldn’t ordinarily want to be for general consumption. One of the buzz-words at f8 last week was ‘frictionless sharing’. In a nutshell, once you use a third-party app/site, you can activate sharing and that’s it - everything you do from that app or site is automatically shared, but you can turn it off again if you want your activity kept private. In principle this is a good thing – it saves you time and effort by not having to authorise an app to post what you’re doing each time you read an article online for example.

However, this seems a little binary. Either you share it all or share nothing. As Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch says, with the previous style of sharing “the only real potential downside is that I’ll forget to share something that my friends might find interesting”. He feels this is a small price to pay, given that with automatic sharing “a mental lapse could wind up with my sharing something uncouth with my friends. Which, depending on who your Facebook ‘friends’ are and your profession, could actually matter”. I suppose it all comes down to knowing what you are sharing and knowing who you are sharing it with.

Sharing is good – of that I am a firm believer. If no one shared knowledge we would not as a species be where we are today. But if we share too much or with the wrong people we could end up in serious trouble. An extreme example of this would be nuclear technology – if every country in the world had the knowledge and means to manufacture nuclear weapons then I doubt we would still be here. On the other hand, if Sir Alexander Fleming hadn’t shared his discovery of Penicillium notatum in 1928, we wouldn’t be where we are in terms of medicine and pharmacology.

To bring things back towards everyday usage, when we are dealing with photos, documents, music, opinions etc it is very easy to cause problems by not sharing them in a manner befitting the content. If you have private things to share, you need to be certain of what you are sharing and who you are sharing it with. If the ‘catch-all’ settings of a social network and it’s third-party apps aren’t up to snuff for your private sharing needs, then you should perhaps think about something that can let you create your own rules and secure sharing groups. This was the driving force behind the creation of DADapp, with which you are in total control – you can share what you want, with who you want, when you want.

UK businesses are moving to the Cloud, but there still remains a strong level of concern over privacy, security and loss of data. In a survey of IT managers by IT support company Precise, 37% of companies say they will migrate 61% or more of their applications to a private cloud environment in the future. However, only 6% of companies said that they are planning on moving to the full public cloud.

But what exactly is the ‘public cloud’ and what is the ‘private cloud’? In layman’s terms, the public cloud means that you hand over your data to a third-party who then store it on a server along with the data of any number of other clients. Private cloud on the other hand means that you still hand your data to an external provider, but each company’s data is kept on its own individual server.

Certain aspects of businesses are already being moved into the private cloud without much hesitation. In 2011, 39% of organisations moved things such as email and collaboration systems to virtual hosting environments, 33% moved their IT management, 20% sales & marketing and 13% security.

But private hosting still means placing a large amount of trust in an external provider and their own security, back-up infrastructure and data retrieval capabilities. And what happens if something does go wrong? 37% of IT managers admitted their concerns that it will take longer to pinpoint the root of problems if anything untoward happens once their applications are in the cloud. If you encounter a problem at ground level, how do you go about trying to locate and fix it? Is there even a reset button for the cloud?

Everyone by now must have heard of a story whereby an employee has lost their job as a result of an ill-advised post on a social media site such as Twitter or Facebook. Most commonly it is when someone has made remarks that are either derogatory to their company or working conditions, or they’ve just be stupid enough to disclose the fact they have bunked off work.

If someone has been bragging about getting away with pulling a sickie and subsequently got caught, then they don’t really have a leg to stand on. But I’ve just read and article about employees rights when it comes to complaining about their lot on social networking websites. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in America recently filed a complaint in Illinois alleging that Knauz BMW – a Chicago area BMW dealership – unlawfully terminated an employee who posted critical comments and photos about how the company handled a sales promotional event.

Robert Becker, an employee at Knauz BMW, thought that the event was a little low-budget for promoting a luxury car brand, and made known his concerns that the event could have a detrimental effect on the commissions he was expecting to earn. Other employees could access his Facebook page, and the following week Knauz asked Becker to remove the posts – which he did. However, the dealership still fired him.

The NLRB filed a complaint on the grounds that Becker’s Facebook postings amounted to concerted protected activity under Section 7 of the Na­tional Labor Relations Act (NLRA) because they discussed the employees’ terms and conditions of employment. According to several recent rulings, the NLRB views employees’ Facebook postings as comparable to discussions that employees commonly have face to face in the workplace, just like they do at the water cooler or in the smoking area.

As far as I can tell, this case is still ongoing, but there have been others like it with mixed outcomes. In certain countries, under certain regulations you may be afforded protection for something you say in public that gets you into trouble. However, if you want to say something that could potentially harm your company or your career, you’re probably best off sharing it privately.

If you’re a teenager and your parents are away  you might be tempted to throw a party for all of your friends at their house. It’s perfectly natural, we’ve all done it, and we all dread the fact that the next day we have to clear the place up with a hangover. But there’s also that niggling thought of “What if this gets out of hand?”. Especially if your father is a Tory MP and the house being partied in is worth £2.25million.

Briony Kirby, daughter of Brighton Kemptown MP Simon Kirby, had to call the police after her small gathering of friends was gatecrashed by around 100 yobs who had found out about the party and location via Facebook. Mr Kirby’s wife Elizabeth said social networking meant it was difficult for parents to protect their children and their homes. She said: “These days, you have Facebook and mobile phones. You’re just stumped”.

Neighbours said they had an ‘awful experience’, having abuse hurled at them and being kept awake by people shouting. The golf course behind the house was also awash with teenagers. The chaos started at around 10pm on August 12, when on for about an hour and a half before Briony called the police. The uninvited guests scattered when sirens could be heard and no arrests were made.

Even though Facebook may be a great way to easily organise an event, if you are privacy conscious you may want to find a more secure way of sharing with your friends. This is not the first time a Facebook event has attracted unwelcome guests, as one unfortunate German teen found out.

IT costs money, whether it is servers or staff, and being able to effectively outsource this aspect of a business definitely trims the spending. Data centres cost lots to set-up and manage, and for fledgling companies in particular it can be difficult to know how much space and processing power will potentially be required when starting up. Cloud Computing allows for scalable IT power that can be shrunk or expanded depending on what a business requires and how busy they are.

But what if your business is the US Government? Vikev Kundra, the White House’s CIO has been championing a ‘Cloud First’ policy, which encourages the use of cloud services for new projects and requires federal agencies to move a least three existing projects to the cloud by next summer.

Some agencies that deal with less confidential information such as the Agriculture Department have been quick to adopt the model, already moving around 46,000 employee accounts to the cloud. But not all departments are convinced by the merits of the cloud, citing the fact that a third-party having control of and responsibility for sensitive information as a big concern:

Susan Swart, CIO of The State Department, would like to see the agencies dealing with less sensitive information prove that the cloud can be trusted before moving other projects to the cloud:

“How can we ensure that the monitoring of the commercial cloud environment is done as well as we believe we do it internally? …Where will the data reside? When we’re managing it on our data centres, we know the answer to those questions.”

There have been several high-profile breaches of security this year, including banking systems and an attack on Amazon that disrupted thousands of private sector websites. It seems that the cloud can be very useful for making hefty IT savings, but until the security can be guaranteed and the third-parties are trusted implicitly, those who deal with sensitive – and in some cases potentially life and death – information on a daily basis will be hesitant to place their data in someone else’s hands.

Google had been given a suggested ‘to-do’ list with regards to improving privacy by the UK’s Information Commissioner. This comes in the wake of last year’s revelation that Google had mistakenly been collecting sensitive wi-fi data while its cars were recording images for Google Maps and Street View.

For the most part this latest audit was positive, although it did warn that similar instances of this security breach could happen again unless practices were changed. But Google were praised for their improvements to staff training and their introduction of a Privacy Design Document (PDD) that set out guidelines for engineers working on new products.

Having said that, the report from the ICO said that this PDD needed to be rolled out more widely across the company. Another suggestion was the introduction of ‘Privacy Stories’, which are a series of video and text tutorials written for users, that explain why Google have been collecting user data in relation to different products such as GMail and Google+.

The Privacy Stories so far cover 28 of Google’s many products, but like the PDD, the ICO have suggested that these be extended to cover all of Google’s services.

Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering welcomed the finding of the ICO’s report, and blogged: ”We know that there is no perfect solution, so we will continue to improve our current processes and develop new ones so that privacy awareness grows and evolves alongside Google. “

A federal judge in the US state of Indiana has ruled that two 10th grade students who posted pictures of themselves in risqué poses with penis-shaped lollipops have been wrongly punished by their school.

At several sleepovers the girls took photos of themselves with the lollipops, as well as in fully clothed suggestive positions and posted those photos on Facebook, MySpace and Photobucket. The high school principal got wind of this via parents, and then suspended both girls from the Volleyball team as they were found to be in violation of the school’s extracurricular code of conduct. However, the federal judge ruled that the code, which casts blanket ban on “bring[ing] discredit or dishonor upon yourself or your school,” is unconstitutionally vague and that in the eyes of the law, by suspending them the school had actually violated the girls’ first amendment rights.

“Ridiculousness and inappropriateness are often the very foundation of humor,” the opinion states. “The provocative context of these young girls horsing around with objects representing sex organs was intended to contribute to the humorous effect in the minds of the intended teenage audience.”

The court added “The case poses timely questions about the limits school officials can place on out of school speech by students in the information age where Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, texts, and the like rule the day… one could reasonably question the wisdom of making a federal case out of a 6-game suspension from a high school volleyball schedule. But for better or worse, that’s what this case is about and it is now ripe for disposition.”

So even though in the end the girls had their punishment revoked by a court of law, they still would have had to initially suffer the consequences of publicly posting photos online that would have best been shared privately. Not all instances like this will be shown the same leniency, so if you’re in doubt, find a private sharing solution to avoid any potential embarrassment or problems.

Users of business networking site LinkedIn should be aware of a new batch of settings that may find some people unwittingly featuring in third-party advertising campaigns.

What has essentially happened is that LinkedIn had actually opted-in all of its users to a tweak in the settings that says they are OK with third parties using their names and photos for advertising. Ordinarily this sort of thing is the complete opposite to what the users would want, and if the service were to be opt-in from the start, the chances are that no one would want to do it. However LinkedIn are by no means the first service to sneak a controversial new feature or setting under the radar by making it opt-out. Facebook came in for some criticism for their facial recognition photo tagging suggestions feature that was rolled out in the same way.

The majority of users may never cotton on to the fact that the option is there, and those that do will probably just end up opting-out and not closing their accounts. Quite frankly, they’re obviously getting some value out of the service, and once they’ve un-checked a box in their settings they are then back to how they were before they got wind of the new feature. They may be a bit miffed for a while but this settles over time.

If you are on LinkedIn and do not want your name or face to appear in an ad that you have no control over whatsoever, you can find out how to change the settings here.