Starting Points

May 9, 2010

U.S. Pressure Helps Militants Overseas Focus Efforts - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the nine-year war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate Al Qaeda, but just “degrade” the Taliban, reversing that movement’s momentum.

Now, after the bungled car-bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?

It is a hard question.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

ON GUARD A Pakistani Army soldier patrols in South Waziristan.

At the time of Mr. Obama’s strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only Al Qaeda had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America’s skies and streets. In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.

Six months and a few attempted bombings later, including the near-miss in New York last weekend, nothing looks quite that simple. As commanders remind each other, in all wars the enemy gets a vote, too. Increasingly, it looks like these enemies have voted to combine talents, if not forces. Last week, a senior American intelligence official was saying that the many varieties of insurgents now make up a “witches’ brew” of forces, sharing money handlers, communications experts and, most important in recent times, bomb makers.

Yes, each group still has a separate identity and goal, but those fine distinctions seem less relevant than ever.

The notion that the various groups are at least thinking alike worries Bruce Riedel, who a year ago was a co-author of President Obama’s first review of strategy in the region. “There are two separate movements converging here,” said Mr. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The ideology of global jihad has been bought into by more and more militants, even guys who never thought much about the broader world. And that is disturbing, because it is a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.”

Mr. Riedel also notes, “The pressure we’ve put on them in the past year has also drawn them together, meaning that the network of alliances is getting stronger, not weaker.” So what seemed like a mission being narrowed by Mr. Obama, focusing on Al Qaeda and its closest associates (which included the Pakistani Taliban), “now seems like a lot broader mission than it did a year ago.”

Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky. Whenever he was asked whether America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were goading Islamic militants into new attacks, President Bush used to shoot back that neither war was under way on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. When President Obama came into office, the conventional wisdom held that the mere arrival of a black president with some Muslim relatives and an eagerness to engage the Islamic world would be bad news for Al Qaeda and Taliban recruiters. One rarely hears that argument now.

A year after Mr. Obama’s now-famous speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, Pakistanis talk less about outreach than Predator strikes. And White House officials say they suspect that their strategy of raising pressure may explain the amateurish nature of the recent bombing attempts.

The militants, they argue, no longer enjoy the luxury of time to train their bombers. To linger at training camps is to invite being spotted by a Predator. The tale told to interrogators by Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case, suggests that he hooked up with one set of militants and was passed off to another, and given only cursory bomb-making training. “He wasn’t the greatest student, but they weren’t stellar teachers, either,” a senior administration official said last week, after reviewing the interrogation record. What Mr. Shahzad had was the one thing the insurgents most covet: easy, question-free ability to leave and enter the United States on a valid passport.

Of course, the United States might more effectively identify citizens who pose a threat. But, similarly, terrorist groups could find ways to more effectively train recruits. As Mr. Riedel notes: “You don’t need a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to build a car bomb. You don’t even need to be literate.”

Indeed, the Pakistani Taliban have set off plenty of car bombs that worked well against the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies. It was those bombings that finally convinced the Pakistani government to go after the group. In Washington, officials differentiate between the relatively young Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban, which have deep political roots in its country. “The Pakistani Taliban gets treated like Al Qaeda,” one senior official said. “We aim to destroy it. The Afghan Taliban is different.”

In fact, one Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a C.I.A. drone attack last summer while receiving a massage on the roof of an apartment building. His successor was believed killed in a similar attack until he showed up on a recent video. As one American intelligence official said, “Those attacks have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban — so it’s no wonder they are beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.”

To the disappointment of many liberals who thought they were electing an antiwar president, Mr. Obama clearly rejects the argument that if he doesn’t stir the hornets’ nest, American cities will not get stung. His first year in office he authorized more Predator strikes — more than 50 — than President Bush did in his last four years in office. In December, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama stated that sometimes peace requires war.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” he said. Negotiations “could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

In fact, recent history and the politics of a polarized Washington are pushing Mr. Obama to step up the pressure. The civil war that paved the way for the Afghan Taliban began when President George H. W. Bush pulled out of Afghanistan once the Soviets left. The Taliban took power and began sheltering Osama bin Laden on Bill Clinton’s watch; as vice president, Dick Cheney often criticized Mr. Clinton’s approach to terrorism, saying he dealt with it as a criminal justice issue, not an act of war. The second Bush administration drove the Taliban from power, but the early histories of the Bush years largely agree that the Taliban saw their opportunity to return when the American war on terror refocused on Iraq. Even the United States, they concluded, could not give its all to two wars at once.

That narrative helped form Mr. Obama’s argument, throughout his presidential campaign, that the Afghan-Pakistan border, not the Sunni triangle in Iraq, was the center of global terrorism. That, he said, was where all attacks on the United States and its allies had emanated.

Now, six months after setting his course, Mr. Obama is discovering, on the streets of New York, the deeper meaning of his own words.

Ping - Into the Cloud - A Head Start on Google’s Chrome OS - NYTimes.com

By BRAD STONE

JORDON WING is a devoted user of Google products like Gmail, the Chrome browser and Google Docs, the Web-based word processing program.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Wing, a high school student from Spokane, Wash., took another Google product out for a spin: the Chrome Operating System.

Steve Forrest for The New York Times

Liam McLoughlin, 17, has compiled Google's open-source code into a working version of its planned Chrome OS. His mother, Stefanie, brought him a snack.

Google is not expected to unveil the highly anticipated Chrome OS until the end of the year, and the software is expected to run, at first, only on the class of low-cost PCs called netbooks. But Mr. Wing, along with a growing number of other Google fans, did not want to wait.

These people are downloading home-brewed versions of the operating system derived from the esoteric source code, which Google releases under the name Chromium. Google is developing the Chrome system as an open-source project and periodically releases the Chromium code online, to let other Web developers contribute to the project.

Several resourceful users have taken those undistilled vats of source code and done something Google says it never expected: they’ve compiled it into working versions of the operating system, tailoring it for use on dozens of computer brands and making it available to regular folks who want to preview one possible vision of their high-tech future.

“Maybe it’s because I’m still kind of a kid, but all this new stuff is exciting,” said Mr. Wing, who installed Chromium on his Dell Inspiron laptop and recently extolled its virtues. “The idea of an operating system that really only does one thing — gets you onto the Internet very quickly — is perfect for me.”

When officially released, Chrome OS will represent a milestone for Google. It will not only be its entry into the market for operating systems, long dominated by its archrival Microsoft, but also a new computing paradigm.

The Chrome operating system is designed to allow computers to boot up to the Web within seconds, onto a home screen that looks like that of a Web browser. Users of devices running Chrome will have to perform all their computing online or “in the cloud,” without downloading traditional software applications like iTunes and Microsoft Office, or storing files on hard drives. Devices running Chrome will receive continuous software updates, providing added security, and most user data will reside on Google’s servers.

Some analysts are skeptical that regular folks will flock to devices that place such severe limits on their computing activities. Chrome OS “is a bet on a future in which we move beyond rich applications and everything eventually gets delivered through a Web browser,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at the research firm Interpret. But that time is not here yet, he said: “Chrome this year and next year is mostly a science project.”

But for legions of Google heads, the fact that it feels like a science project adds to the allure. Working versions of Chromium have appeared across the Web and have been downloaded more than a million times. By all accounts, the most popular and functional have been on the Web site of a 17-year-old in Manchester, England, who goes by the Internet handle “Hexxeh.”

Liam McLoughlin, as Hexxeh is known to family and friends, is a college student and programmer who has taken Google’s Chromium code and compiled it so the operating system can be downloaded to a separate USB memory stick, which can then be used to boot up a computer. He has spent countless evenings and weekends configuring Chromium to work on various kinds of computers, including the Macintosh, and added features that Google has not gotten to yet, like support for the Java programming language.

He explained that his work on Chromium began partly as a way to demonstrate his computing skills and possibly open doors in the technology industry. It also sprang from an interest and belief in Google’s computing vision. “Many people don’t care about how PCs work and all the security software that comes with today’s computers. They just want to use the Internet,” he said.

Since last fall, a small but vibrant community has formed around his work, encouraging him with ideas and supporting his efforts by providing money for servers and other programming tools.

Steve Pirk, a former systems engineer at the Walt Disney Company and now based in the Seattle area, helped to support a coding marathon this year by donating $50 via PayPal, which Mr. McLoughlin spent on a supply of highly caffeinated Jolt cola.

Mr. Pirk said he tested Hexxeh’s resulting software, code-named Flow, on a half-dozen computers; all functioned properly running Chromium from a USB drive. He says he looks forward to the day when low-powered but fully functional computers running Chrome can help lead to a new wave of telecommuting. “The more work we do in the cloud, the less need there is for people to be in physically secure network environments,” he said.

All of the activity around these prenatal incarnations of Chrome is something of a double-edged sword for Google. The company wants developers and other companies to work beside its engineers, developing their own versions of the operating system. But Google says it did not anticipate that regular people would start using Chromium — and evaluating it — before it was ready for prime time.

NEVERTHELESS, the Google executive in charge of Chrome OS took pains to express support for the Google fans trying Chromium — and for their presumptive band leader, Mr. McLoughlin.

Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, said that “what people like Hexxeh are doing is amazing to see.” Though he called the Chromium releases an “unintended consequence” of the process of developing open-source software, he said, “If you decide to do open-source projects, you have to be open all the way.”

An Expatriate Filipino Writes of a Parallel Life - NYTimes.com

By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU

HONG KONG — The story begins with the death of Crispin Salvador, an expatriate Filipino author living in New York, whose body is found floating in the Hudson River. He had been scathingly critical of his home country before his mysterious demise.

Christie Johnston for The International Herald Tribune

Miguel Syjuco's first novel, “Ilustrado,” written after he left the Philippines, won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008.

It is part of a novel, a satire of the chaos and violence of Philippine politics called “Ilustrado,” the first book by Miguel Syjuco, an expatriate Filipino author living in Montreal. And — if the book was not clear enough in its theme that art reflects life — the fictional narrator and Salvador’s protégé is also named Miguel Syjuco.

The real-life Mr. Syjuco, a dapper 33-year-old, has been promoting “Ilustrado,” which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, on a tour through the United States and Britain, where it will be released in coming months.

Sipping tea amid the wood paneling of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club — in a camel blazer with matching red pocket square and red cuff links — he looked the part of a gentleman from a good Philippine family. Mr. Syjuco, who once held entry-level jobs at The New Yorker and other magazines before deciding to devote himself full time to writing, is clearly from the educated upper classes that he skewers in his book.

“My family, my friends, my colleagues — we are the elites,” he said. “We are a wealthy, beautiful country, and we’ve screwed it up so badly. The majority of wealth is controlled by a minority. And we don’t know when enough is enough. The elite don’t want one mansion; they want three.”

Like his fictional counterpart in the book, Mr. Syjuco came from a political family but declined to enter the business himself.

His real-life father, Augusto Syjuco Jr., known as Boboy, stepped down from a cabinet post in the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to run for Congress in national elections on Monday. So far, nearly three dozen people have been killed in attacks linked to those elections. While Mr. Syjuco is disparaging of the violence, he says he is not overly worried about his father.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Mr. Syjuco said. “He’s with Gloria Arroyo — in her party. He is entrenched in his district, and he has his bodyguards. So he is more protected than candidates from grass-roots parties.”

Mr. Syjuco said he did not want to draw too close a comparison between his own life and the book, but the parallels — the fictional Miguel Syjuco, an orphan, disappoints his doting grandparents when he fails to live up to their political ambitions — are obvious.

“My dad wanted me to be a lawyer, a politician, the president of his country,” Mr. Syjuco said. “I have two sisters and three brothers, and not a politician among any of them. I was my dad’s great last hope.”

Mr. Syjuco was unheard of before “Ilustrado” won the Man Asian Literary Prize, which shares a sponsor with the Man Booker Prize and recognizes the best Asian novel written or translated into English. Outside of the Philippines, he could not even get short stories published in journals.

“I got rejected left and right,” he said. “I wallpapered my wall with rejection slips, the way F. Scott Fitzgerald was said to have done.”

In fact, when “Ilustrado” won the award, it was still an unedited draft with no publisher.

Understandably, Mr. Syjuco had almost no expectation of winning. “I just wanted to get on the long list so agents would pay attention to me,” he said.

“I remember sitting in front of my computer, waiting for midnight — since the long list would be announced at that moment — and hitting the refresh button over and over. I did the same thing when the short list was announced. When I flew out to Hong Kong for the awards dinner, I thought I’d just eat a lot of Chinese food and get drunk.”

Miguel Syjuco was born in the Philippines to a Chinese-Filipino father and a Spanish-Filipino mother, into a family whose wealth was anchored in a soft-drink bottling company.

His parents moved abroad during the Marcos era, and Mr. Syjuco spent much of his childhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. “The first thing I wrote was in grade five. I tried to write a sequel to ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” he said.

He returned to the Philippines for high school and college and, as he says, “got onto the right path when I flunked out of economics in university.”

He and some friends put together Local Vibe, an entertainment Web site. But he could not free himself of family ties and expectations, so he decided to move back overseas.

He knocked around the United States, Canada and Australia, studying, writing and trying to stay financially afloat. He had entry-level jobs at The New Yorker, Esquire and The Paris Review, and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Columbia University. He is finishing a Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide, in Australia.

“Ilustrado” starts off as a murder mystery. When Salvador dies, the draft of a politically biting masterpiece he had been working on disappears. The book then moves into what are, for the Philippines, complicated and interwoven issues of sex and poverty, migration and work, religion and governance.

Its short chapters come in a cacophony of fonts and voices. There are excerpts from the two main characters’ own writing, plus e-mail messages, newspaper articles, blog comments, flashbacks and dream sequences.

The style is postmodern (or, as some prefix-happy critics call it, post-postmodern) right down to the faux footnotes. The novel is short, sharp and funny, though some critics have called it overwritten. (“Yet it was the internecine intensities of the local literati that gossiped Salvador’s life into chimerical proportions.”)

“I don’t particularly like the postmodern tag,” Mr. Syjuco said. “It’s a novel of today, a contemporary novel. The way we consume information is fragmented.”

Mr. Syjuco explained that “Ilustrado,” which means “enlightened” in Spanish, refers to a period in the late 1800s when the Philippines was a Spanish colony and Filipinos traveled to Europe to be educated in the arts, sciences and politics.

“These young men, the ‘enlightened,’ returned home to aid in the 1896 revolution that ousted Spanish control,” Mr. Syjuco said. “There are 8.1 million Filipinos abroad now. They have the potential to be the new ‘ilustrado’ class. But of those 8.1 million, only 500,000 are registered to vote in the upcoming elections. Maybe they have turned their back on the democratic process.”

Mr. Syjuco, who has already sold a second book to a North American publisher, identifies himself as a Filipino author but says that overseas life gave him the distance needed to see his country’s problems.

“I don’t know if I could have written this if I had stayed in the Philippines,” he said.

He declined to predict what would happen in the coming elections.

“My book asks some tough questions, but it’s not the Great Philippine Novel,” he said. “I’m 33. I don’t have all the answers. If I did, I’d be running for president.”

The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online - NYTimes.com

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

“I am much more self-censoring,” said Sam Jackson, a student.

By LAURA M. HOLSON

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Min Liu, thinking about her career, has begun removing personal information from the Web.

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

The erosion of privacy has become a pressing issue among active users of social networks. Last week, Facebook scrambled to fix a security breach that allowed users to see their friends’ supposedly private information, including personal chats.

Sam Jackson, a junior at Yale who started a blog when he was 15 and who has been an intern at Google, said he had learned not to trust any social network to keep his information private. “If I go back and look, there are things four years ago I would not say today,” he said. “I am much more self-censoring. I’ll try to be honest and forthright, but I am conscious now who I am talking to.”

He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.

His Facebook account, which he has had since 2005, is strictly personal. “I don’t want people to know what my movie rentals are,” he said. “If I am sharing something, I want to know what’s being shared with others.”

Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.

That mistrust is translating into action. In the Pew study, to be released shortly, researchers interviewed 2,253 adults late last summer and found that people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

Elliot Schrage, who oversees Facebook’s global communications and public policy strategy, said it was a good thing that young people are thinking about what they put online. “We are not forcing anyone to use it,” he said of Facebook. But at the same time, companies like Facebook have a financial incentive to get friends to share as much as possible. That’s because the more personal the information that Facebook collects, the more valuable the site is to advertisers, who can mine it to serve up more targeted ads.

Two weeks ago, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to review the privacy policies of social networks to make sure consumers are not being deliberately confused or misled. The action was sparked by a recent change to Facebook’s settings that forced its more than 400 million users to choose to “opt out” of sharing private information with third-party Web sites instead of “opt in,” a move which confounded many of them.

Mr. Schrage of Facebook said, “We try diligently to get people to understand the changes.”

But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.

Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said.

Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.

Helen Nissenbaum, a professor of culture, media and communication at New York University and author of “Privacy in Context,” a book about information sharing in the digital age, said teenagers were naturally protective of their privacy as they navigate the path to adulthood, and the frequency with which companies change privacy rules has taught them to be wary.

That was the experience of Kanupriya Tewari, a 19-year-old pre-med student at Tufts University. Recently she sought to limit the information a friend could see on Facebook but found the process cumbersome. “I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to limit my profile, and I couldn’t,” she said. She gave up because she had chemistry homework to do, but vowed to figure it out after finals.

“I don’t think they would look out for me,” she said. “I have to look out for me.”

May 7, 2010

Posting To Facebook Via Mobile? No Update Privacy For You!

May 7, 2010 at 2:05pm ET by Danny Sullivan

It’s kind of crazy. I’ve been playing with Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” search feature recently, and many people who hide their profile information have no problem sharing sometimes really personal updates with the world. Are there people on Facebook who don’t understand how to keep their updates out of the public eye? And why doesn’t Facebook allow for mobile updates to be private?

Searching Everyone’s Updates

You might have missed Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” feature. It’s easy to overlook because search results aren’t shown by default. Consider this search for hungover:

When you start typing, Facebook suggests some options right within the search box. Pick any of those, and you go directly to a person, page or application, rather than overall search results. It’s easy to do this by hitting enter, so that you never get the search results at all.

If you go to the very bottom, there’s a “More Results” option as highlighted above. Click that, and a broader set of results appears:

Notice on the left-hand side of the results, there are options to get results back from all these categories:

All Results
People
Pages
Groups
Applications
Events
Web Results
Posts By Friends
Posts By Everyone

In the search results above, you can see that “All Results” is highlighted, so I should be getting back results from all these categories. However, that’s not what happens. Instead, Facebook only brings back results from matching Pages, Posts By Friends and Web Results. That’s it.

(This, by the way, is just one example of why I often joke to people who warn that Facebook will beat Google in search that Facebook has enough problems searching Facebook itself, much less the entire web.)

Now look what happens if I drill in to the “Posts By Everyone” category:

Suddenly I see what Facebook failed to show me before, all the people on Facebook telling the world about their hangovers.

Sharing Hangovers On Facebook & Twitter

Do these people all mean to share this way? Well, it’s not like people on Twitter don’t share about having hangovers:

They key difference between Facebook and Twitter is that at Twitter, by default you’re sharing with the world. At Facebook, the default for updates is to share only with your friends.

In other words, post to Twitter, and most people probably realize they’re telling something to the world. Post at Facebook, and many people might think they’re only sharing with their friends.

Facebook’s Warnings About Sharing To The World

Indeed, Facebook deserves credit in really making you jump through hoops before you can share an update to the world. For example, here’s what you get in a brand new account, before you’ve ever even posted something:

That links over to a privacy FAQ page, and the only way the message disappears is if you manually click to close it. If you don’t close it, the message reappears each time you come back to the status area.

Beyond that, if you make an update and change from the default “Only Friends” option:

To the “Everyone” option, you get another warning:

After doing a post to everyone, your default remains stuck on “Only Friends.” Facebook doesn’t shift it to “Everyone,” something it could do if it wanted to try and get people to be more public about what they’re sharing, something many people — including myself — suspect them of wanting to do.

You Hide Your Profile, But Not Your Updates?

So why would I think some people don’t understand the Facebook privacy settings, when it comes to updates, especially when they have so many hoops to jump through?

Consider a search for hate my boss. I’m not going to put up a screenshot, because I don’t want to immortalize anyone and get them in trouble. But do that search, and you get posts like:

hate my job. hate my boss.

i hate my job. talked to my managers and boss didn’t help and made it worse

Do people saying these things realize that their bosses might also see the updates? To test, I went to the profiles of 10 people who each appeared in that “hate my boss” search. Here’s what I saw for all 10 of them (I’ve blanked out the name for the example shown):

The message tells me that this person is sharing only some of his info with everyone, right? And yet, I can see their updates. In fact, if I select the “Wall” tab, I see all their updates nicely displayed. If someone’s boss found them by name on Facebook — which isn’t hard to do — they could do the same.

Why would all these people who keep their profiles locked down still share updates? One issue might be that by default, Facebook displays the “this person shares only some things” message to anyone who isn’t someone’s friend, because chances are everyone has some tiny bit of information that by default isn’t shared on Facebook.

Facebook’s Mobile Free-For-All

Another reason is mobile. I fired up the Facebook application for the iPhone. There’s a big “What’s on your mind” box that appears at the top. Enter something, like “I hate my boss,” and that message goes to your Wall — and to the world.

Unlike Facebook itself, there are no privacy settings that I can find in the application, no share with “Only Friends” choice. If you share via the iPhone — and perhaps other mobile devices — you share with the world. That’s also true if you use Facebook’s mobile site on the web. There’s no option there other than to share with the world.

Going back to those 10 people I reviewed? I can also see that 6 of them in the search results are tagged as sharing “via the Mobile Web.” In contrast, for 10 people I looked at who said hate my boss on Twitter, only one seemed to do it via mobile.

Maybe some of those people on Facebook didn’t mean for their updates to go public. Or, maybe they’re just stupid or don’t care. I can’t fault Facebook for how it handles things on its full web site, in terms of highlighting privacy issues with updates. On the mobile front, they look to be screwing up big time.

Advice For The Concerned

By the way, as Facebook’s privacy issues ramp up, I read about more and more people wondering if they should cancel their Facebook accounts. I went through a similar struggle last December (see Now Is It Facebook’s Microsoft Moment?). As a marketer, I ultimately decided I still needed to be on the Facebook platform. But I also shifted to primarily sharing information through my fan page, where everything is public, by default.

I highly recommend fan pages to anyone. It may be a way for you to feel you have more control on Facebook at a time when it’s difficult to understand what Facebook is likely to change next. Don’t be put off on the weirdness of having a “fan” page. Just think of it as a way to have a place on Facebook where you know everything is public, a constant reminder that what you say is being said to the world overtly — rather than a constant fear that what you say or do might get shared to the world without you realizing that.

Alternatively, just assume that all you do on Facebook is public, that there is no privacy. Make that assumption, and you’ll be relatively safe — assuming that apps don’t start tracking all your web surfing habits and reporting back to the Facebook mothership or the world. To be really safe, always log out of Facebook.

Advice For Facebook

To Facebook, my advice is more blunt. Get your shit together. Enough explanations that the web is more comfortable being public or everyone has “granular” privacy controls and other platitudes. Each day, there seems to be some worry — just do a search for Facebook on Techmeme for a summary.

This week, we’ve had everything from private chats being exposed to applications that add themselves to your profile. Today, it’s how people might be sharing to the world stuff they believe is private through your mobile applications.

Someone over there, anyone — stand up and scream that your company is screwing up big time on the privacy front. You keep getting away with it so far, but that might not continue.

10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

by Dan Yoder

After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on Facebook. I'd like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I'd like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I'm not missing anything. In any event, here's my "Top Ten" reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.

10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided. Let's start with the basics. Facebook's Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook's interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you'll see, there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.

9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior. From the very beginning of Facebook's existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg's ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world's largest social network. They're particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy. Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ...

7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch. At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).

Update: Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook's privacy policy.

6. Facebook is a bully. When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is now social." So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you're actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how much data is really available. It's one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications. At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted. Even if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't trust Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account. It's one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had enough, it's pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted" their account.

2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web. The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks. Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable thing in the world, at least they've tried to stay focused and aren't trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed - have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Napster Goes Social with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Integration

Image via CrunchBase

Long running music service Napster has struggled to maintain relevancy in recent years. Today the Best Buy-owned property is making a major social media push to once again reclaim some of its former glory.

The pay-to-use streaming and download web application now includes Facebook (), Twitter (), YouTube () and Flickr () integration so that users easily share their music interests with online friends and consume social media content like Flickr photos and YouTube videos from bands and artists while they listen.

On the Facebook front, Napster has integrated Facebook Instant Personalization so that users can “Like” artists, albums and playlists. The “Like” functionality is the standard Facebook offering, so Likes are shared back to user profiles and users can see which artists and songs their Facebook friends Like.

Image via Wikipedia

Individual tracks now also include share buttons for posting to Facebook and Twitter. Even though Napster’s service requires a pay-per-month subscription plan, friends and followers will be able to stream and listen to the shared songs for free.

In addition, users can now experience artists’ YouTube videos and Flickr photos — think studio and concert shots — available on each artist’s page.

Napster’s also made improvements to album art and reworked the credit system so that user credit balances are up-to-date and always visible in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

The changes are significant and likely the company’s best shot at reclaiming user attention. We’re especially curious to see if this update spurs more interest and helps it become more competitive with music newcomers like Spotify () that operate under slightly different models.

Facebook Adding Location Features This Month

Image by habi via Flickr

Information has leaked that Facebook is set to roll out location-based features for users and brands as soon as this month. According to Advertising Age, users could see location options any day now.

These features include the ability to check in at various locations, including retail spots and restaurants. We’re unclear as to whether users will be able to add or customize their own locations, but we are fairly positive that this move will put Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla and other location-based services in an uncomfortable position.

Meaning for Users

The ability to check in to different locations is, as we’ve reported previously, a game-changing feature for Facebook. Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and other startups that specialize in location-based features and services — and that often take checks from corporations for branded integrations — might have trouble competing with a Goliath like Facebook if the push toward checkins continues. Facebook has the userbase and mainstream adoption to bring location-sharing tools to a huge audience, excluding these newer competitors from the market. And if the company is rolling out features now, that likely means an acquisition is not likely, either.

If this feature does indeed roll out soon to end users, it also brings with it another round of privacy concerns. It’s clear that not all users understand the risks of public sharing or how to protect their likes, groups and updates. When they risk exposing their locations to the general populace, another layer of security precautions (along with the usual media FUD) is sure to follow.

Meaning for Brands

Image via Wikipedia

McDonald’s will be the first brand to test the new features. The McDonald’s integration will involve users checking in at McDonald’s restaurants and showing featured food items in their posts. Digital advertising and marketing shops around the country are preparing to construct campaigns around this new functionality.

It’s interesting to note that this move further puts Facebook into competition with Google for local advertising dollars. Being able to target users geographically as well as demographically gives hyperlocal advertisers an edge and might cut into Google’s most profitable revenue stream.

Wikipedia Now Lets You Order Printed Books

Image via CrunchBase

Wikipedia’s launching a new feature for English readers: The ability to create custom books from Wikipedia’s huge bank of free content. Because of the way Wikipedia’s images and copy are licensed, they’re free for anyone to access, use and share in this way.

PediaPress is a book publisher for wiki content; it’s in a long-term business relationship with Wikipedia () to print these books. PediaPress now offers paperbacks and will soon add hardcover books to its catalog, as well.

The price of each book varies, depending on the number of pages; paperbacks start at $8.90. Users can also simply download a PDF of the “books” they create.

The book-creating tools are built into the website. Starting today, users will see a “create a book” button in the print/export section of the left sidebar.

“When I came up with the idea, my colleagues told me my shower was probably too hot,” said PediaPress Managing Director Heiko Hees in a release this morning. “But I was tired of reading on the screen. I believe that in this hectic age people cherish their offline moments more and more. You wish you could access the most extensive and up-to-date knowledge in offline moments – on the train, at the seafront, in your bed.”

Compared to other services that have attempted to tackle this problem, like e-readers, Wikipedia has the disadvantage of only offering non-fiction content and having content that can and does change periodically.

But PediaPress has two distinct advantages. First, content can be customized around any topic or topics the user desires. The ability to curate content is one of the hallmarks of the latest wave of digital creativity. Second, this medium is the absolute best for those who choose to spend time offline; you’ll never need a power adapter or an Internet () connection to enjoy a book.

PediaPress is already up and running in 17 languages, serving 33 countries.