Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 1st July 2009
17 COMMENTS 
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
In the last hour Facebook has announced a number of changes that you need to know about.
- It’s now easier to control what you share with who
Wherever you can share anything (photos, videos, personal information etc) you’ll be able to choose from multiple privacy levels; ‘Everyone’ (to make it completely public), ‘Friends and Networks’, ‘Friends of Friends’, ‘Share With Friends’ and ‘Customize’ (allowing you to choose specific people to share with.
- Privacy options have been simplified
Privacy options for your Facebook account currently span six pages. These have been consolodated into one page.
- Regional networks have been removed
These have always been an odd part of the Facebook experience. Some countries had many small networks while others had one network. Facebook says only 50% of users are in a regional network.
- Transition Tools are being introduced
To ensure that users are eased into Facebook’s new-found ability to share anything with anyone, Transition Tools are being introduced. This will allow you to change who can see different parts of your profile quickly and easily. Until you change anything here, your existing privacy settings will remain in place.
What does this all mean?
The good news is that if you like your profile to be private it will stay that way. If you want to operate more publicly you can do that too while still being sure those embarrassing photos from your college years remain hidden from public view.
While it’s good that Facebook is simplifying its privacy options, there are still concerns. Facebook is considering allowing anything that’s shared with ‘Everyone’ to be indexed by search engines. This makes sense on one level, but what about if you want to change your mind and make it private later? Will those embarrassing photos remain cached by Google if you hide them from view on Facebook?
The new privacy controls and the removal of regional networks will be rolled out to all users over the next few weeks. While previous Facebook changes have caused uproar, it’s unlikely there’ll be much to complain about here. Only the removal regional networks may cause a problem, but opening up parts of your profile to everyone should solve this problem for most people.
Facebook has today announced a number of changes that you need to know about. The changes make it easier to share information publicly without getting bogged down in Facebook’s current complicated privacy controls.
Here they all in one simple-to-follow list.
- It’s now easier to control who sees what
Wherever you can share anything (photos, videos, personal information etc) you’ll be able to choose from multiple privacy levels; ‘Everyone’ (to make it completely public), ‘Friends and Networks’, ‘Friends of Friends’, ‘Share With Friends’ and ‘Customize’ (allowing you to choose specific people to share with. (more…)
Written on 3rd June 2009
5 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
“We made it to Kansas City in one piece”; an innocent tweet which may have cost Israel Hyman his Mac Pro. The Arizona-based video editor was out of town seeing relatives when his house was burgled and his computer and two displays taken. Israel has blamed the incident on that single tweet, which also updated his Facebook status.
It’s unclear whether or not some devious criminal was actually scoping out Twitter for victims but there are bound to be more of these stories in the near future. As use of real-time social data services becomes more common we’ll get used to sharing our location either consciously (via a service like Google Latitude) or passively via geotags on photos and videos that we upload.
Even if you don’t actively share your location online there’s likely to be the other data about you out there that make putting a place to the online name easy. Domain name registration records, public electoral roll records, even the phone book – they’re all tools that can help to track you down. It’s easy to imagine a future in which ‘Geolocational crime’ becomes more prevalent.
At least there was some good news for Israel Hyman. The thieves may have taken his computer but at least they left a back-up. His Drobo storage device was untouched.
[via Switched, via ABC News]
Written on 13th May 2009
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Browse your NSFW content in style! Imagine 15 people in an office all wearing this. How awesome would that look?! Okay, there are some drawbacks: how quickly can you get out of the pullover to pick up your phone? How attractive will you be to the opposite sex? Is there room for a cup of coffee and a sandwich?
I like it…
Written on 4th March 2009
74 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Spotify, a web/desktop media player have just announced that someone has managed to “compromise their protocols” and gain private information about their users.
The details the hackers may have gotten their hands on include: passwords, email address, birth date, gender, postal code and bill receipt details.
The hacker(s) managed to access information about Spotify members last year, whilst the the flaw they infiltrated was fixed just before Christmas.
Spotify have said:
Last week we were alerted to a group that managed to compromise our protocols. After investigating we concluded that this group had gained access to information that could allow testing of a very large number of passwords, possibly finding the right one. The information was exposed due to a bug that we discovered and fixed on December 19th, 2008. Until last week we were unaware that anyone had had access to our protocols to exploit it.
What you need to do.
If you signed up on Spotify before December 20th 2008 and if you use the same password on alternative services – change ALL your passwords immediately.
More at the Spotify Blog.
Written on 30th January 2009
3 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
More and more the privacy of web surfers became a big concern. Not only for web surfers themselves but also for the service providers (ISPs, websites, etc).
One piece of the trail a web surfer leaves behind, as he navigates or uses web services, is the IP address.
This IP (Internet Protocol) is a tiny string of numbers like 234.12.102.15. There are millions of combinations! Every computer which gets on the Internet has this type of address which identifies each of them in the crowd (usually, assigned by the Internet Service Providers).
Most of the common users are not aware of this. However, that’s not the case of the service providers. Many of them use to get and store the IP addresses of the users so they could make their technology better, because the law requires them to, or just because that’s what they wanted.
Google used to retain the IP addresses indefinitely until the voice of privacy activists became too loud. Now it keeps that data for about 9 months. Yahoo keeps it even less: 3 months.
But one search engine (meta search engine, in fact) doesn’t keep it at all. That’s a Dutch search engine ixquick which became the first to operate in this way, according to The Register.
The Article 29 Working Party, which is a committee made up of the privacy watchdogs of the European Union’s 27 member states, said last year in a report on the issue that any company that kept logs for longer than six months risked falling foul of data protection laws.
See the details here (PDF file).
We salute the way ixquick approached this problem!
Written on 11th November 2008
7 COMMENTS
Martin Kloos, Web Strategy Consultant
Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month we’re discussing the Future of Reputation written by Danial J. Solve, Secrets of Social Media Marketing written by Paul Gillin and Click written by Bill Tancer.
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
Lots and lots is being written nowadays on all the positive things that are happening on the social web. Most of those books are descriptive: they describe the phenomena, throw in some cases and some best practices and that’s it. Few on the other hand, try to get to the (sometimes negative) bottom of a specific phenomenon. The future of reputation, written by Daniel J. Solve, is such a book. Solve is professor of Law at the George Washington University and has written extensively about reputation and privacy in the past. In the future of reputation, Solve thoroughly writes about the trail of information about our lives that is instantly available online and the implications of this on our personal lives. How it affects our being and how we are perceived in the information age. Well thought and well written. If you don’t want to buy the book you can always read the entire text online.
Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business!
I’ve read “Join the Conversation” and “Marketing to the Social Web” before, which I think are both very insightful and entertaining books on marketing in the age of the social web. No wonder I got excited by Paul Gillin’s latest work Secrets of social media marketing. Known from it’s best seller “The new Influencers“, Gillin has now written a true handbook on social media marketing. The appraisals name Paul Gillin as one of the few who truly understand marketing to the social web. As you would expect, the book is chock-full of information, new cases and best practices. As The Future of Reputation, much of Secrets of Social Media Marketing can be read online so you can find out yourself whether you should by this book as well.
Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters
Bill Tancer is the leader of global research at Hitwise, so he should know a bunch about our online behaviour don’t you think? Well it seems he does and he wrote it all down in Click: What Millions of People are doing online and why it matters. Click gives a sneak peek into the works at Hitwise, a research firm with sample populations in the ten’s of millions of people. Clicks gives insights in what we search for, some cool online analysis, and what our online behaviour tells us about ourselves. One cool finding I got from Bill Tancer’s website is the following: “The combination of charting search and social network traffic to music artists’ sites provides a visual depiction of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.” Entertaining, but not much more to expect.
Written on 30th September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
A remarkable “Oh Shit” campaign has launched in Estonia, aimed at educating ordinary computer users.
Many of you probably remember Estonia survived what has been called the world’s first Cyber War last year. It was launched by Russians and made headlines around the world. Thanks to The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Estonia, led by the chief security officer Hillar Aarelaid, Estonia was successful in defending itself against the so called DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
A couple of weeks ago, Aarelaid’s team launched a somewhat controversial campaign in Estonia, aimed at educating the computer users in Estonia. The campaign is called “AssaPauk”, which can be translated in English as “What a hell?” or “Oh Shit”! There’s a good chance this is your first emotion after discovering that you are in some sort of a criminal “cyber mess.”
The campaign, that should guide people how to use the Internet safely, is focused on three lessons: which links are OK to click and which are not? What kind of passwords to use? And how to avoid an unpleasant identity theft.
“I am a pedophile! How about you?”
Actors telling real stories are used to get the lessons across. For example, there’s a guy who says that he was made a pedophile inadvertently. He used short easy-to-memorize password (his wife’s name) for many different Internet applications. When suddenly finding that someone had guessed the password and uploaded nasty porn images into his weblog. (Take a look at his YouTube video, the poster below is saying “I am a pedophile! How about you?”)
“I am a thief! How about you?”
Or there’s a woman claiming that she had made a thief against her will. She clicked on an unknown link and apparently a virus downloaded into her computer. So her computer was used to steal credit card data of other people. And now she has become a suspect of serious crime. (YouTube video, the poster above is saying “I am a thief! How about you?”)
Member of an international gang
Another woman received an e-mail saying that she should update her Internet banking passwords immediately or they will expire. For doing that she was asked to fill in her existing passwords and sent them to “the bank”. She ended up sending her passwords to strangers, who used her bank account for transferring stolen money. So without knowing it, she became member of a international thief gang. (YouTube video)
CERT gives many different hints to avoid such unpleasantness. Hillar Aarelaid says that the days where viruses only harmed files are over. Today criminals are infecting people’s computers to take control over them and use them for criminal purposes, while remaining undetected.
If you understand Estonian, take a look at how Estonia educates its people, by clicking here.
Written on 25th September 2008
8 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When Loic Le Meur pitched Seesmic to Holland’s most talented cross media talents, he also told them how he handled a suicide announcement on his video service. Quite an interesting story, so I figured I’d share it with you.
Le Meur was in his San Francisco-based office, watching a big LCD screen where the desperate person was depicted. “People emailed us that he looked very serious”, Le Meur said, “the guy was about to kill himself, what do you do?”
So while hundreds of Seesmic members tried to convince the man to not kill himself by posting comments on his videos, Le Meur called his lawyers. “We’re a US-based company after all”. They advised him to call the police, which Le Meur did.
“We gave the police his IP address. After twenty minutes, they knocked on his door somewhere in the middle of the US”. An interesting example of a case where security is more important than privacy.
Update: check out Loic’s comment, he actually gave the email address.
Written on 11th August 2008
3 COMMENTS
Tessa Sterkenburg,
Last week the harddisk of my computer crashed and unfortunately there was nothing the repairshop could do. Of course this happened on the day that I realized that my last backup was 2 weeks ago.
Luckily, my spreadsheets and documents are hosted by Google docs, my blogposts and information about my company are in Wordpress, many of my photo’s are on Flickr, and my address book is in Plaxo. Furthermore, I can retrieve information via the mail that gets backed up by Apples new Mobile Me service. While the laptop is being fixed I simply borrow a computer and within a few minutes I am back in business. You could say that I store a lot of my information via online services and I access them via a web browser, a phenomenon that is called Cloud Computing.
Of course there has been discussion about the security and ownership risks of cloud computing. Yesterday, a new one came up: privacy risks.
The privacy risks of cloud computing
At the DefCon hackers gathering in Las Vegas, the US military academy professor Greg Conti warned the audience that a trend to push software into the “clouds” exacerbates privacy risks as people trust information to the Internet. Conti also said that “we already give away tons of information about ourselves by searching and mapping software and social networking services, records of email and text messaging are routinely saved and it is common for websites to use software that tracks where online visitors came from and where they go next.”
He continued with “Information on your computer may get protection under the law, but on someone else’s it gets less protection.” The US Department of Justice has tried to pry search data from Google, and China pressured Yahoo to reveal the identities of pro-democracy advocates voicing opinions online. “How hard would it be to target someone as a political activist or a person with AIDS?” Conti asked rhetorically.
The consequences of our online behaviour
I am surprised that privacy risks are linked to Cloud Computing. As Conti says himself: there is a lot of information about individuals online already. Even if cloud computing didn’t exist, information could be found through the way we use search engines and the information we share via blogs and websites.
It is not about how we search, share or host information, it is about the consequences of our online behaviour. You shouldn’t have to hide who you are and what you do. I expect the postman not to read my snail mail, just as I expect the government not to read my GMail.
It seems that we are being warned against using services based on Cloud Computing. However, instead of frightening everybody and talk people into deleting their Facebook profile, shouldn’t we make sure that there are laws to protect people online? Just as they are (or should be) protected in real life?
If someone steals my belongings from my house, he should be arrested. If someone steels my car he should be arrested too, even if I left it on the street.
Written on 7th August 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Google Adsense has announced some key enhancements, based on the technologies of the in March acquired Doubleclick. These improvements will offer a “better experience for users” (meaning less annoying and less privacy) and “better value for advertisers” (meaning more statistics and control):
These steps will be introduced in the coming months:
- Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.
- Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.
- Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.
- View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.
To be able to provide these new statistics, Google needs to follow your footprints through the Google Network. So Google will embed a cookie that monitors how many times you’ve seen an ad and whether you clicked on it. If this doesn’t sound like a good idea to you, there’s the possibility to opt out.
How about the not-so savvy users?
As a savvy user, you’ll be aware of this. But the majority of people browsing around the Google network still think there only is an analog version of cookies (the ones you’ll find in a jar). So how will they be able to know Google is tracking most of their online activity?
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