This document discusses privacy issues related to social media usage. It begins with definitions of privacy and an overview of relevant privacy laws in the US and Canada. It then discusses how a lack of privacy laws for adult social media usage can lead to problems, including employers viewing profiles and future consequences. Emerging issues are explored like facial recognition and extensive digital dossiers combining various data sources. Reactions to privacy concerns from social media executives and users are presented. The document concludes with advocacy efforts and resources for protecting privacy online.

1. Intellectual
Freedom,
Privacy &
Social Media
Eli Edwards

2. Personal introduction
&
First Principles

3. What is privacy?
• “The right to be left alone.” -- Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis
• Privacy/autonomy - the right to do things as
one sees fit without unreasonable government
interference: ex. - right to marry, right to bear
children, etc.
• Information privacy - the right to keep one’s
personal data out of the hands/view of others

4. The Legal Landscape
of Privacy
USA CANADA
• COPPA • PIPEDA
• FCRA • PIPA
• 1974 Privacy act • FIPIPA
• USA PATRIOT Act
• VPPA
• TCPA •

5. Privacy laws relevant
to some of us (in the
U.S.)
• COPPA
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in a
nutshell: commercial websites Collecting online
information from minors under 13 years of age --
higher standard of consent, collection practices,
what can be displayed, what can be sold

6. More Privacy laws
relevant to us
• Library Records
• There is no privacy protection for library patron
records/information at the federal level
• 48 States have legislation that protects library patron
records @ the state level
• However, those states protect records, not online
activity, even if it’s on library computers

7. But there is no
privacy law for social
media usage by adults
• The Federal Trade Commission will crack down on websites that
violate their own privacy policies or COPPA
• Former Congressman Rick Boucher (D-WVa.) introduced an Online
Privacy Bill, but he was voted out of office last year
• The Deleting Online Predators Act was introduced in 2006-2007
but died in a senatorial committee.

9. Truth and ...

10. Findability:
a bug, not a feature?
• Finding all sorts of information is the point of Web 2.0
• The Streisand effect
• It doesn’t necessarily occur to many people just how easy
it is to stumble upon information about themselves
• According to danah boyd, some teens are affronted
at the thought of their parents, teachers, future
employers, looking at their profiles

11. ... Consequences
• Current employers may • Future employers will
look up what you post look up what you post
• “Complaint issued against New • “I Flunked My Social Media
York nonprofit for unlawfully Background Check. Will
discharging employees following You?” - Gizmodo
Facebook posts” - National
Labor Relations Board • The Sad Saga of Stacy the
Drunken Pirate (“Court
• “NLRB Says Newspaper’s Firing Rules Against Teacher in
of Reporter Over Twitter Posts “MySpace ‘Drunken Pirate’
Was Lawful” - American Bar Case”)- Washington Post
Association Journal

12. Can Social Media Hurt
Your Career
In a 2010 paper commissioned by Microsoft,
70% of U.S. recruiters interviewed said that
they’ve rejected job candidates on the basis of
information they found out about the
candidates that were available online.
-- Reputation in a Connected World

13. Disturbing Events can
happen via social media
• Harrassment • Identity theft
• Cyber-stalking • Fraud/Phishing
• Sexual predation of • Hate speech
minors propagation
• Hoaxes • Organizing criminal/
terrorist activity

14. An Unfortunate,
recent example

15. #TECHFAIL
• Glitches and breaches and cyberattacks, oh my!
• MySpace photo glitch - pictures marked private
made available to the public due to bad code
• Sony PlayStation Network was attacked by a
group of programmers calling themselves
LulzSec -- users’ account information,
including credit card numbers was taken,
reports of unauthorized uses arose

16. #policyfail(?)
• Twitter donates its archive of tweets to the Library
of Congress, shocking and dismaying many users
• Facebook has undergone considerable criticism of:
• How its privacy features work
• How often their interface and privacy policies
have been changed
• Not allowing pseudonymous accounts (more on
this later)

17. Emerging Issues
• Business/Professional-oriented networks growing:
should you participate & on which ones?

18. Emerging Issues,
Con’t.
• Some users attempt to control their privacy by using
pseudonyms for their accounts
• Is this good or bad? For other users? For the sites?
• Facebook has a clear policy of banning non-legal
names for personal accounts
• Google+ currently has an unclear policy regarding
pseudonyms, but users have had accounts suspended
for possibly violating the community standards due to
supposed use of a non-standard name

19. More Emerging issues
• Facial recognition added to Facebook:
• When users upload photos to Facebook, the company’s
software will try to match up faces with those of other
users. If it finds a match, the user will be prompted to tag
the photo with the name. As Sophos points out, “the
tagging is still done by your friends, not by Facebook, but
rather creepily Facebook is now pushing your friends to go
ahead and tag you. Remember, Facebook does not give you
any right to pre-approve tags. Instead the onus is on you to
untag yourself in any photo a friend has tagged you in.” -
Digital Trends

20. One more emerging
issue
• Convergence in the Digital Panopticon:
Web-tracking & cookies + purchasing
information + social media content =
IMMENSE DIGITAL DOSSIER
- “Web tracking has become a privacy time bomb,”
USA Today, Aug. 3, 2011

21. One Reaction to Social
Media concerns re:
oversharing
“Privacy is dead. Deal with it.”
-- Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems

22. Not a Privacy Warrior
Part I
• “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. We view it as our role in the system
to constantly be innovating and be
updating what our system is to reflect
what the current social norms are. ...
[W]e viewed that as a really important
thing, to always keep a beginner's mind
and what would we do if we were
starting the company now and we
decided that these would be the social
norms now and we just went for it.” -
Mark Zuckerberg,
1/8/2010 Founder & CEO, Facebook

23. Not a Privacy Warrior,
Part II
• “If you have something that you don't
want anyone to know, maybe you
shouldn't be doing it in the first place.” -
12/3/09
• “I don't believe society understands what
happens when everything is available,
knowable and recorded by everyone all
the time.” - 8/14/10
• “[Schmidt] predicts, apparently
seriously, that every young person one
day will be entitled automatically to
change his or her name on reaching Eric Schmidt,
adulthood in order to disown youthful
hijinks stored on their friends' social Former Google CEO
media sites.” - Wall St. Journal, 8/14/10

24. “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer;
you’re the product being sold.”
- blue_beetle, Metafilter

25. Users’ Reactions to
Privacy Issues
• More awareness of privacy implications
• More judicious use
• More advocacy for more and better interfaces/
policies/choices

26. More Awareness
• Reclaim Privacy: • Browsing History
Automated review of your
FB privacy options • Vacation plans
• 8 Things You Shouldn’t • Public posts w/ your
Give a Social address or phone
Network(including): number
• Exact birth date (esp. w/ • Compromising or
birth location) sensitive pictures/posts
• Money

27. People Don’t Really
Post Their Phone
Numbers, Right?
From my own Twitter stream, by someone
I’ve never met

28. More Judicious Use
• People are starting to change their behavior:
• Erasing content
• Choosing what to post (a 2011 Pew study
found that people are less likely to share
personal health information on Facebook
than other topics, citing potential access by
strangers and marketers)
• Using available privacy options

29. Options for
Protecting Privacy
• Diaspora - a privacy-sensitive social network (still in
closed “alpha”)
• Reputation.com

30. Advocacy and
Education
• Illustrating the privacy effects of social media:
• Pleaserobme.com - Website that scrapes Twitter
and location-based networks for messages that
indicate 1) where someone lives and 2) that
they’re not at home
• The Night I Was Cyberstalked/How I Became
a Foursquare Stalker - UK Guardian stories
about an experiment with social media and
personal information

31. dotRights by the ACLU
• Learn about how Facebook apps affect your
privacy
• Quiz: What Facebook Quizzes Know About You?
• Analysis of major social media actions affecting
privacy and security

32. Why give this talk to
librarians
• As information professionals who abide by standards of
intellectual freedom, we should care about privacy, particularly
in regards to information seeking behavior.
• As users of social media, we should model good practices,
instruct our constituencies on how to protect their personal
information, and help advocate for our users
• As information professionals, many of us may be in a position to
access and use information gleaned from social media about job
candidates, students, third parties, etc.
• As users of social media -- we want to protect our privacy, too!

33. Some Personal,
Common-sense rules
• Those third party apps on social networks can get a lot of
user data, but aren’t fully vetted by the network - be
careful
• If you don’t want to use your own picture, you don’t have
to ..
• Some people have the following mindset: anything I post
online could end up public, regardless of what
precautions I take
• You can’t control what other people post about you, but
you can control what you post about others - be respectful

34. Some Additional
Resources
• “Real Names Are an Abuse of Power,” danah boyd, zephoria.com
• “Know Your Workplace Rights!” Bureau of National Affairs
• “Social Media: The Privacy and Security Repercussions,” Johnny
Widerlund, Search Engine Watch
• “Social Insecurity: What Millions of Online Users Don’t Know Can
Hurt Them,” Consumer Reports
• Choose Privacy Week, American Library Association

35. Thank you!
Eli Edwards
http://www.madlibrarian.net
ms_eli@yahoo.com
Twitter: @miss_eli