3 Comments

Comment by Francisco Rosado "El Pegador" on 28 January 2008 at 1:19am

Facebook: The New Look of Surveillance By Ari Melber, The Nation
Posted on January 16, 2008, Printed on January 16, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/72556/ When one of America's largest
electronic surveillance systems was launched in Palo Alto a year
ago, it sparked an immediate national uproar. The new system
tracked roughly 9 million Americans, broadcasting their photographs
and personal information on the Internet; 700,000 web-savvy young
people organized online protests in just days. Time declared it
"Gen Y's first official revolution," while a Nation blogger lauded
students for taking privacy activism to "a mass scale." Yet today,
the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely
unabated.

Comment by Francisco Rosado "El Pegador" on 28 January 2008 at 1:20am

Generation Y's "revolution" failed partly because young people were
getting what they signed up for. All the protesters were members of
Facebook, a popular social networking site, which had designed a
sweeping "news feed" program to disseminate personal information
that users post on their web profiles. Suddenly everything people
posted, from photos to their relationship status, was sent to
hundreds of other users in a feed of time-stamped updates. People
complained that the new system violated their privacy. Facebook
argued that it was merely distributing information users had
already revealed. The battle -- and Facebook's growing market
dominance in the past year -- show how social networking sites are
rupturing the traditional conception of privacy and priming a new
generation for complacency in a surveillance society. Users can
complain, but the information keeps flowing. Facebook users did not
recognize how vulnerable their information was within the site's
architecture. The initial protests drew an impressive 8 percent of
users, but they quickly subsided after Facebook provided more
privacy options. Today the feed is the site's nerve center. Chris
Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, said that when he speaks
on campuses these days, students approach him to say that while
they initially "hated" the feed, now they "can't live without it."
Still, Facebook hit a similar privacy snag in November after it
launched Beacon, a "social advertising" program that broadcast
users' profile pictures and private activities as advertising
bulletins. When a Facebook user bought a product on one of dozens
of other websites, for example, the information was sent to
Facebook and distributed across the user's network as a "personal"
ad. ("Joe Johnson rented Traffic at Blockbuster," for example.)
Many users had their pictures and actions morphed into
advertisements without their consent, turning private commerce into
public endorsements. That could be an illegal appropriation,
according to Daniel Solove and William McGeveran, two law
professors who specialize in digital privacy and who blogged about
the issue. MoveOn.org formed a Facebook group to demand that Beacon
switch to "opt-in" -- a default to protect uninformed users -- and
allow people to reject the program in one click. The group drew
less than .2 percent of Facebook members, far less than during last
year's feed protest, but this time MoveOn helped the protest group
press specific reforms, generate critical media attention and even
rattle some advertisers, who backtracked on using Beacon.

Comment by Roger Cummiskey on 10 March 2008 at 10:26am

ARTROGER - ArtBelow 10/03-24/03 London Underground. WESTMINSTER -
JUBILEE LINE PLATFORM WESTBOUND. ARTROGER XII Exposición de
Primavera - Asociación Española de Pintores y Escultores-
Delegación Fuengirola. 7-17 March. Casa de la Cultura, Fuengirola.