We are holding the Privacy and Usability Methods Pow-wow at the British HCI conference just across the water in Dundee. The workshop is intended to be a highly informal discussing methodologies and models for studying privacy in computing systems. So if you have been studying privacy, or if you have a wacky idea for which you need some methodological help, please consider submitting and/or attending! We hope to have some travel subsidies available courtesy of SICSA so keep an eye on the workshop web page.
Today is Data Privacy Day. Perhaps you could spend some of it thinking about what is wrong with Google’s new privacy principles?
By now everyone must be sick of hearing about Facebook’s widely-criticised new privacy settings. So rather than add my 2p, I will point to some interesting posts from the blogosphere:
- The EFF explain the changes
- Joseph Bonneau reminds us that it is our social networks that are the most important data to keep private
- Ian Brown points out that it’s not all bad, as users now have more control over those annoying Facebook applications
- The Joy of Tech explains Facebook’s Newspeak
- Danny Sullivan compares Facebook to Microsoft (strange, because Google and Apple would be the far more obvious choices for “evil” corporation these days) and demonstrates the mess that the current Facebook privacy settings have become
Hopefully our PVNets project will help design privacy settings that actually reflect what users, rather than online social network operators, desire.
UPDATE: Facebook have backtracked and now provide some functionality for hiding your list of friends.