Is Privacy an Over-Rated Legacy of the Past?

The concept of privacy is a tricky one, to say the least.  Most people, when asked for a quick response would likely tell you that privacy is very important to them and that they are concerned about who has access to what they consider “private” data about them.

However, these very same people will create Facebook accounts, wander the web without using any sort of anonymous IP cloaking, send emails without encryption and speak loudly on their cell phones at crowded restaurants.  Many people are surprised to learn that things like your home address, phone number, email and endless other data is already freely (or at least) easily accessible to anyone handy with a few search engines and a database or two.

As we willingly share more and more information about our day-to-day lives via Twitter or Facebook status updates one has to wonder if we might not be better served giving up on this false sense of privacy and just open the floodgates.

As Matt Asay at CNet says:

Think about it. My in-box already knows where I’m traveling, what I buy, etc. because my receipts go there. If someone were to merge this data with my phone records (easily had for the price of my AT&T login credentials), my e-mail log, and my Twitter, IM, and social network data, they’d know exactly who I know and where I’m likely to bump into them…I’d love to automatically be told that my good friend Mike is in London at the same time as I am, and have a service suggest a reservation at a favorite restaurant (which it would know through my past OpenTable reservations). I’d “pay” for that by giving up a lot of data.        LINK

At first glance, this sounds crazy to a lot of people but the question is whether it is more valuable to you to keep your travel plans secret or to make them widely available as a potential way to add value to your travel.  We are already targeted by advertisers for our social behavior and choices made both online and offline, so it’s not especially new, at least in concept, that our personal data could and should be used in this manner.

The larger question is whether or not the whole concept of “privacy” is really just a social concept that is undergoing a major shift.  I am sure that the views on privacy from a sixty-year-old are radically different from those of a twelve-year-old.

TweetMic Should Give RIAA Nightmares

There is a cool little iPhone App called TweetMic that I read about in Mashable earlier this week.  The App allows you to easily publish live recording to your Twitter followers:

The interface is simple: click on “record,” talk (you don’t really have to talk, you can play an instrument, a lute, for example), click “publish” and that’s it.

Cool, right?

What I really found interesting, however, was how the Mashable reviewer thought that he might use this handy application:

While I don’t record audio too often, I must admit that having the possibility to quickly record something and tweet it while you’re on the go is very interesting; being an avid concert goer, I might just start using TweetMic for those special “awww, they’re playing my favorite song” moments.

Now, a normal human being reading that might think, “Hey, what a neat idea,” because, hey, that’s a neat idea.

Of course, it probably never occurred to either the reviewer or our normal human being that this was just the sort of dangerous thinking that could DESTROY MUSIC FOREVER!

You see, if you were a lawyer for RIAA you would understand that giving a concert-goer the ability to immediately upload and broadcast their personal concert-going experience, why that’s simply stealing! By sharing how awesome the concert it with friends you are single-handedly murdering music! (don’t try to follow this logic – it is like religion, you just have to accept it and move on)

Interesting, isn’t it, that the reviewer never even considers that his idea is both illegal and likely to kill that which he loves? I wonder why that is…

Now, you have to ask yourself, do you want to side with the RIAA, who want to stop you from being able to share a one-of-a-kind awww moment and who’s longterm goal appears to be suing anyone claiming to be a fan of music or would you rather work to reform our outdated and misguided copyright laws?

Miramax Bribes Potential “Pirate” with Free Tickets

Today, thanks to the fine folks at CNET, I read the story of @omgamandaa and how she got free tickets to the new Miramax movie, “Adventureland.”

@omgamandaa was looking around the web for a working torrent link to a “pirated” copy of “Adventureland.”  To my own surprise, it looks like she was having trouble finding one.  As it turns out, after doing a bit of poking around myself, I couldn’t find one either.

In my opinion, this bodes badly for the film.  It simply isn’t popular enough to have inspired a pirated version to hit the marketplace.  Too bad, as the box office returns are below expectations and the film could use some great word of mouth from those who were never going to go see the movie in the theater but, if they liked it at home, might tell their friends to go check it out.

Anyhow, someone from Miramax saw @omgamandaa’s tweet (probably tracking Twitter for mentions of the film) and was offered two free tickets to see the film in a theater – a deal she took them up on.

What can we learn from this story?  Well, CNET seems to think the lesson is one of caution:

While this seems like a good business practice and nobody was harmed, it is kinda scary to know how closely we’re being watched. If a company can reach us to give a reward, it may very well be able to do the same when it wants something else.

I disagree.  While it is true that everyone should be aware that what they post online can and will be used against them by any and all who see an opportunity, what this really demonstrates is the power of using social networking to meet one’s needs. @ogmamandaa wanted to see “Adventureland” but she didn’t want to pay for it – probably because she feared it wouldn’t be worth the investment of $10-12.  So, she voiced her dilemna to Twitter and the social network responded with two free tix to the show.

@omgamanda got a free screening and Miramax got some free press and good will for their efforts to help her out.  Maybe other companies will realize that suing your potential customer is not the best first response to piracy but I doubt it.

LINK

PirateBay On Facebook Forces the Issue

Like so many other sites have done, The Pirate Bay is no providing on-click links that allow its users to post directly to their Facebook streams.

As Mashable puts it:

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 150 to 200 million people signed up already. It’s one of the best ways to share links, blog posts, and content. Many websites, including our own, have links for easily sharing content to Facebook. So it makes sense as to why The Pirate Bay would want to encourage people to share torrent links on Facebook. But because many of these files are illegal to download, it also makes sense that copyright infringement organizations are not very happy.

Since Facebook is likely to want to avoid major legal action by the friends folks at the RIAA and MPAA it seems almost definite that Facebook will move to block this feature.

The question is, do they have any real legal reason to do this and are they really helping anyone by blocking their users from posting the links?  For one thing, The Pirate Bay does not actual store or transmit any copyrighted content, they simply provide links to other places that do.  This is, in effect, no different than what Google does, just that The Pirate Bay (and hundreds of other torrent-tracker sites out there) specializes in searching only for torrent links.

While the MPAA et. al. might not like that links to freely available copies of their copyrighted content are being made all-the-more public on Facebook via The Pirate Bay feature, neither of these parties are the reason that piracy exists or that it flourishes in the face of broken business models that treat fans as criminals.

We’ll have to see if Facebook does, in fact, act against The Pirate Bay but you can be certain they’re being asked to do it.

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UK’s Social Media Masters Degree Not So Silly

The UK’s Birmingham University is offering a one-year masters program in “social media” and many short-sighted individuals seem to think it is a silly waste of time and money:

Offering courses on how to use social media for business and marketing is one thing. But an entire degree on it? As Politico columnist Ari Melber posits on Twitter, It’s about as brilliant as a degree in email would have been ten years ago. (via)

Here is how the program is described in the GuardianUK:

Students on the £4,000 one-year Social Media degree, offered by Birmingham City University, will explore how we communicate on the websites and how they can be used for marketing.

Other modules on the course will teach students how to start a blog and podcasting techniques. The course is being advertised through a video on the university’s website.

It seems to me, especially in this challenging economic climate, that spending a year mastering the tools of communication online is a far more valuable investment than, say, a two-year masters in English Literature or many other areas of study we’ve all come to accept as “valuable.”

Sure, the basics of social media are not all that complex, but those who are able to master and manipulate those networks stand to end up far ahead of the pack.

If I had the money in hand, I would probably go take the program myself.

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Naive Facebook Users Cry Over Mythical Privacy “Rights”

A bunch of Facebook users who clearly have deluded notions of privacy rights are up in arms over a recent change to the “terms of service” that nobody actually bothered to read when they signed up in the first place:

This month, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated. (via)

The notion that you have some right to keeping private that which you have posted on a social network is just plain absurd.  Those who desire privacy should not be on social networks, or using the internet at all, really.  The days of privacy are pretty much over and have been for a long time.

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Facebook Suspends Whopper Sacrifice after 250,000 De-Friended

Looks like a whole lot of people think a Whopper is worth more than 10 friends.  Since Burger King introduced the Whopper Sacrifice application on Facebook, which gets you a coupon for a free whopper if you de-friend 10 people from your profile, almost 250,00 have found themselves dropped for a burger.

Now, Facebook has suspended the application.  They say it is temporary and due a violation of certain privacy terms but it seems to me that they just weren’t very pleased to have so many people de-friended.

This raises the more important question – if 25,000 people are willing to drop 10 friends for a burger what would it take for someone to drop Facebook altogether?  What if Ford offered you a car if you canceled your Facebook account completely?

On a side-note, “de-friended” is a pretty terrible Web 2.0 word…

I Love Scene Kid LOVE

Quick thanks to Tilzy.tv for turning me onto “Scene Kid LOVE” a dead-on satire of the Facebook generation with a brilliant combination of love and snark.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VORIXLfq9Ws&hl=en&fs=1]

This series is racking up an impressive 300,000+ views/episode and holds those numbers steady over time.  The writing and acting is fantastic and reminds me in some ways of the UK’s “Absolutely Fabulous” but I can’t say they are actually similar.

Anyhow, it is a fantastic example of speaking to your audience and not trying to reach the lowest-common-denominator.  This is where webseries really shine. (see: The Guild)

What’s Your Privacy Worth? A Free Smartphone?

Image via Wikipedia

The NYT has a good article about the pros and cons of massive data mining and the state of our personal privacy.

As a jumping-off point they look at a program being run at M.I.T.

“Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.

Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network. ”

While this is a relatively harmless and completely voluntary invasion of privacy it raises a slew of questions about what constitutes “private” actions and how, in this digital age especially, are we going to balance the technical ability to track and gather personal data with the rights of the individual?

NYT piece is definitely worth a read.

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Fred is Genuine AND Viral AND Sponsored…

This is sort of the perfect web story.  I mentioned “Fred” about a week ago. He is a YouTube phenom racking up 7-figure view counts on nearly every video he puts out. I wondered just who he was and whether or not he was the product of some ad house.

Well, NTV got the dirt:

““Fred” is actually 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank, and while age ain’t nuthin’ but a number, these other stats might impress you: According to Cruikshank’s rep, Cruikshank and his two cousins made a total of $14,000 on YouTube for 7 million video plays on non-Fred projects during the month of February. Cruikshank did 23 million video plays in May on his own with Fred…”

They even got an interview.  Good reading.