policy

PHILADELPHIA--Does privacy exist anymore? Do we even know what it is? A conversation between digital academics Jeff Jarvis and Danah Boyd on Friday morning at the Supernova conference capped off a week in which many peoples' perceptions of the tension between public and private data online were shaken (and stirred).

"We have no definition of privacy," said Boyd, a charismatic Microsoft researcher who says she has spent the past two months working on a data-intensive analysis of news stories pertaining to Facebook's ongoing privacy controversy. The massive social network has been criticized by bloggers, advocates, and lawmakers … Read more

PHILADELPHIA--There are few words in digital-media jargon that are more weighted than "transparency."

Though it was overshadowed by talk about the complexities of broadband access policy, government transparency was one of the topics highlighted in a set of "Policy Workshop" panels on Thursday at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business as part of the Supernova 2010 technology conference. But, as is one of the downsides of a 45-minute panel, the speakers were barely able to scratch the surface.

These calls to action on access and openness come at an uneasy time for Washington … Read more

Though it has successfully resisted pressure to install a mandatory "panic button" on users' home pages, Facebook has permitted the U.K.'s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) to build an app for its platform that members of the social-networking site can use to report online abuse directly to CEOP or seek advice about potential dangers of the Web.

Called ClickCEOP, the app has been released following negotiations and eventually a partnership with Facebook. On Tuesday, U.K.-based Facebook members between the ages of 13 and 18 will see an ad on the site that … Read more

McDonald's. Blockbuster. And now Facebook? The social network and its controversial privacy policies are teeming with new complications as regulators overseas increasingly start to regard them as a suspicious, Americanizing import.

This week, data protection officials in Hamburg, Germany, sent a menacing missive in Facebook's direction, accusing the social network of partaking in illegal activities by retaining data about people who aren't members of the site but whose contact information may have come into its possession through members' e-mail importer tools. Last year, the privacy commissioner in Canada put significant pressure on Facebook to simplify its privacy … Read more

Facebook announced Wednesday that it's beginning to institute a new interface that will pop up when users connect their Facebook accounts to third-party services--one which the social-networking company says will bring more "transparency" (yes, that word again) to how much information its nearly 500 million users are sharing across the Web.

Consequently, when a third-party application that connects to Facebook asks a user for permission to do so, it has to stipulate exactly what parts of a user profile it'll be accessing: photos, friend list data, basic public information, and so forth. This is something that … Read more

Facebook announced Thursday the hire of Marne Levine as its first-ever vice president of global public policy. She'll start at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based tech company next month, but will remain based in Washington, D.C.

Currently, Levine serves as chief of staff for the White House National Economic Counsel; previously, following a background in the online payments space, she worked in the Department of the Treasury's Office of Legislative Affairs and Public Liaison, and was chief of staff to former Treasury head Larry Summers when he was president of Harvard University.

"I'm excited that … Read more

Twitter acknowledged Tuesday that "from a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October." It's a big embarrassment for a company that, over the past year or two, has managed to clean up its reputation for technical instability and that this spring one-upped critics by unveiling a business model that looks like it might actually work.

"Last Friday, we detailed on our engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability … Read more

I received an e-mail recently from my good friend and book co-author Chris Stakutis, who is also vice president of emerging technology at CA.

Chris can have very different ways of looking at things, a quality that makes him well-suited for his job. The e-mail I'm reprinting below (with a few edits for brevity) is a case in point.

From time to time, one of the organizations that specializes in counting things speculates that in the next five years, humans will generate many yottabytes of data. Here's an example from IDC. (Yes, you can yotta yotta data.) These … Read more

Two nonprofit groups with a history of criticizing Facebook's privacy policies put out splashy messages on Friday to voice their opposition to the social network's latest changes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a timeline of Facebook's privacy policy modifications over the years, and liberal activist group MoveOn.org launched a Facebook group called "Facebook, respect my privacy!" in response to its new "Instant Personalization" option that shares a significant amount of profile data.

The two groups' tactics are somewhat different. But like a cadre of U.S. senators who have recently raised concerns … Read more