Privacy

February 23, 2010 - Two weeks ago today, I wrote an editorial titled Why Does The Government Need To Know If Your Oven Is On? It was picked up by a variety of other websites; many of which are focused on consumer activism. The piece was about the federal government's plan for incorporating smart-grid technology in all home appliances (as described in the Federal Register on February 9^th). The technology has the potential to be highly intrusive and end privacy in your home as you know it today. Since the notification published in the Federal Register asked for comments, I suggested that readers respond by telling the government that any data collected should belong to them and that use by third parties should not be allowed. I can only assume that the government didn't like the comments it was receiving since the White House published a new Federal Register notice on February 19^th and any comments submitted prior to today are nowhere to be found. Is this just a mistake or is it sleazy government in action?

When the original Federal Register notice was published regarding the incorporation of smart grid technology in home appliances, I immediately tried to comment. The first surprise that I ran into was that the website for comments was not actually online. No worries though. Comments could also be submitted by e-mail. Eventually, those comments should have been posted on a working government website; something that doesn’t appear to have happened yet.

February 9, 2010 - Given the myriad of problems facing the United States right now, you can be forgiven for not worrying about what information your water heater is sending to the US government. The fact of the matter is, right now, it is not sending the government any information. But the Obama administration wants to change that. In fact, it wants to know just about everything you are doing with major appliances in your home on a real time basis; an announcement which it made in this morning's Federal Register. More importantly, it wants to control how you use those appliances. If you think about it, the prospect of this is downright frightening and it would mean the end of privacy in your home as you know it.

The Federal Register isn't exactly the publication that most people read every morning. That fact may be exactly what the Obama administration is counting on. It is however the publication in which new government proposals, rules and regulations must be published prior to the time they can be put into effect. In this morning's issue, the Science and Technology Policy Office which reports to the President published a request for public comments that is quite revealing. The request concerns "Consumer Interface With the Smart Grid", which is what the administration is calling the new electric grid for United States.

Facebook put in play the privacy policy updates they promised on December 1st. I blogged about it yesterday, lauding the process that will it will at least cause users to think about how they share information on Facebook – it’s likely to be the only time they are pressed to do so.

Today Adam Ostrow at Mashable posted responses from various organization who have put themselves at the front of the personal-privacy-on-the-Internet issue. They have all come out with responses that portend the end of personal privacy on the web, should users ignore the process and just blindly accept the ‘suggested’ setting proposed by Facebook.

When presented with the dialog box and process today, I took extra time to understand what they we’re asking and what it might mean. I do recognize that many users will not take the time, they will trust the recommendations and they will just click through the dialog boxes, permitting a level of visibility of their Facebook presence they perhaps did not intend.

If Facebook users are concerned about what they share, this process will allow them to review their setting (a good thing) and establish a level of personal visibility commensurate with their wishes. If a Facebook user is not concerned with what they share, they will be able to quickly and easily set their account to be as open as the front door at Macy’s on Black Friday.

A lot has been said in the press over the past few months about global government vs. the rights of individual sovereign nations. Much of this has had to do with speculation that Barack Obama would very much like to see a global government, but to date, that has been little more than speculation based on comments he has made. But on Saturday, by order of the President that United States gave up a big a large chunk of its sovereignty by allowing foreign police to operate in the United States without any US government oversight, and virtually nobody noticed. The decision means that foreign police operating under the INTERPOL banner can now conduct their activities without regard to the constitutional protections that all Americans should enjoy within our borders.

In Friday's Federal Register, there was a line item in the Presidential Documents section that read "Amending Executive Order 12425". The title was about as innocuous as they come, and reading the amended executive order didn't help much either. It was very short and read, in part:

This was after Adam Ostrow at Mashable posted responses from various organization who have put themselves at the front of the personal-privacy-on-the-Internet issue.  They have all come out with responses that portend the end of personal privacy on the web, should users ignore the process and just blindly accept the ‘suggested’ setting proposed by Facebook.

When presented with the dialog box and process today, I took extra time to understand what they we’re asking and what it might mean.  I do recognize that many users will not take the time, they will trust the recommendations and they will just click through the dialog boxes, permitting a level of visibility of their Facebook presence they perhaps did not intend.

Facebook has introduced a new set of privacy options with its Publisher tool, i.e. the box at the top of your profile which you use to post content and status updates, links, photos and videos. Now users can choose and audience for every nugget of content that they share online, right at the very moment when they are sharing it.

The possible options provided by the publisher are:

• Everyone: This option allows you to share your content with anyone, on or off, of Facebook.
• Friends of Friends: This option allows you to share your content with people who are friends with a friend of yours.
• Friends: This option allows you to share your content with your friends.
• Custom: This is an advanced option that allows you to create custom lists and then share you content with people included in those lists, so you could for example create an inner circle of friends, or family list and create certain content with only these circles.

The new publisher options were launched in June, but are now available to the general public. You will get an introduction message, when you will try to post something on your profile for the first time.

The video embedded below provides an overview of these enhanced controls:

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The changes, the updates and all associated to the much loved privacy on the Facebook platform have raised quite a controversy. I guess that has something to do with the initial post about the updates being very vague, not to forget that many users found them to be having them go public. Well the social network is helping its users with a three step transition to help them get along with the new privacy settings, hoping that it satisfies every user of the platform. And they are so bent upon having you see the transition steps that they wont show you the setting unless you have seen the steps.

I was reading a comment from our reader and he complained:

The possibility to hide our own friends list to some people or lists! I find it a big violation of my own privacy: I chose to hide my friends list from some groups of people who could just access the mutual friends, now they can see my whole list. And no way to go back as it was before!

Well Facebook has taken some sort of notice about such complains and has removed the View Friends so that a minimum number of your friends is made visible in the search results. Plus it also lets you edit the number of friends that are visible on your profile to others. You can do so by editing Friend’s box and decide who is visible and to whom. As for the fear of user profiles going public, you are even allowed to decide who can see you in search, within Facebook or for the search engines.