Principles of Social Media Privacy

People share common misconceptions about the Internet because they don't know how the Internet really works. This comes especially to light during the use of social networking services, such as Facebook. Many frequent users of social-networking sites do not have a full understanding of the potential consequences their current online activities might have later in their lives. For example, a Facebook posting that a friend thinks is cool might be seen by a much larger audience than expected--including perhaps future employers who wouldn’t think it was so cool. In addition, not understanding--or not thinking about--the consequences of posting often leads to oversharing information about other people, including friends and relatives.

A site that summarizes important rules about Internet and social media use is the http://teachingprivacy.icsi.berkeley.edu page. We invite you to browse around and experiment. Be sure to watch some of the videos on the site as well!

Can you think of other privacy issues other than the 10 principles? Discuss and provide feedback on the website!

Then, discuss the following questions with your peers. You can use the Internet to get any information you need. Think of it as a scavanger hunt.
  1. What is an information footprint? How would you measure the size of your information footprint?
  2. What are cookies and what do they do? Why do they matter for anonymity questions?
  3. Why would it matter who sees your information on the Internet, as long as you’re not doing anything wrong?
  4. When you send a message over a network, how does it get from your device to the recipient’s device?
  5. What’s the difference between private communication and secure communication?
  6. Who has the rights to your information? To your email? Your Facebook/Twitter/Instagram posts? Files you have stored in the cloud?
  7. How is passing information around on the Internet like the party game Telephone? How is it different?
  8. Can websites and online services make copies of your information without asking you? How do you know if they’ve duplicated it?
  9. If you don’t actively use the Internet, does that mean you’re not on the Internet?
  10. Can you tell if a Facebook or Twitter account with the name of a celebrity is really them? How many Paris Hiltons are there on Twitter?

Hidden Metadata

When you post on the Internet, you're often sharing not only the content of your posts, but metadata like geolocation (GPS tags) and time stamps associated with those posts. Your information footprint includes all that metadata, as well as inferences that can be drawn by putting all the information together. The Ready or Not application was created to help you visualize how part of your footprint--the geolocation information and time stamps associated with posts on social media like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook--could be used to find you in the physical world.

Try it out here: http://teachingprivacy.icsi.berkeley.edu:8080/ and
  1. Test it on one of the suggested celebrities, such as stevewoz.
  2. Test it on somebody else you know.
  3. Discuss with your peers what consequences could arrise from having location and time metadata publicly available.

More on Privacy

Try these two apps:
- Panopticlick
- Visualization of Facebook's Privacy Settings