• Jon Stewart’s pre-Oscar interview on Larry King Live (CNN) – This interview is a perfect example of why people like me are watching The Daily Show for news. Stewart is sharper and more analytical than most of the chattering classes on the cable networks and reporters on network news. In addition to politics, Stewart talks about the writers strike and the inanity of the core argument. (Whether writers should be compensated for online usage of their work.) Oddly, the podcast version I saw is 10 minutes longer than the version on CNN’s site.
• The Anonymity Experiment (Popular Science) – Think you can hide from prying eyes? Think again. A Popular Science writer tries to avoid leaving a trace for a week. The piece looks at the myriad ways in which our movements can be tracked, including credit cards, Internet access logs, phone calls, email, security cameras and toll transponders. With the lack of effective privacy regulations and virtually no punishment for privacy breaches, American businesses have little incentive to protect consumers. All the incentives go in the other direction — collect, merge and sell as much data as you can. The government? They’re just as interested in collecting all these data. via Doris Truong
• Did ‘SNL’ Go Beyond the Pale With Fauxbama? (Washington Post) – Paul Farhi looks at the decision to use a white/Asian actor to play Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels responds that Fred Armisen was the best man for the job; critics counter that it’s ironic that at a time when an African American might be headed to the White House, SNL doesn’t do enough to develop black talent.
  Kudos to washingtonpost.com for embedding the video instead of making readers guess what is being talked about. It’s the first time I’ve seen an embedded hulu video player. Good video quality with related content post-roll. If you’re in the hulu beta, check out this video for Neutrogena Coin Slot cream. A lower quality version is embedded below. via Kimberly Davis

• Why Lane Hartwell Popped the ‘Bubble’ Video (WIRED) – The hilarious video by the Richter Scales parodying the Web 2.0 bubble to the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” disappeared from the Web after photographer Lane Hartwell filed a takedown request with YouTube. A picture she took of Valleywag’s Owen Thomas was used for a fraction of a second in the parody video. Although she’s gotten a lot of flack for it, it’s hard to fault her for protecting her rights as a photographer.
  The issue also brings up the challenge that the Web and amateurs pose for people like Hartwell. It’s easy to steal commercial content and it’s easy to find freely usable “good enough” amateur content. When flickr makes it so easy to find pictures that you are free to use, why go through the hassle of improperly using a commercial image? (The picture in this post is a Creative Commons image from Telstar Logistics.)
• Amazon Ordered to End Free Delivery on Books in France (IDG News Service) – The French high court rules that Amazon is selling books too cheaply because free shipping constitutes an illegal discount. Under French law, booksellers can’t discount a book by more than 5% off the list price. (Discounts of 50% on bestsellers aren’t uncommon in the United States.) via Dave Smith
• Search: 2010 – A Review (WebProNews) – A look at the future of search with Marissa Mayer from Google, Larry Cornett from Yahoo!, Justin Osmer from Microsoft and Daniel Read from Ask. More of the usual stuff. Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen speaks of moving from “relevance” to “usefulness” to evaluate search. Good luck measuring that. via Jim Simmons
• Dodd Challenges Google to Provide Leadership in the Digital World (WIRED) – Presidential Noshot Chris Dodd speaks at the Google campus about providing leadership in the new information driven economy. He chastens Google for their approach to China and encourages them to stand up to governments (including our own) when they seek to trample the rights of their citizens.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn’t on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

As I said the other day, finding the right level of friction when collecting user data is tricky. Among the scenarios that I outlined, this probably falls at 5 1/2. The partner sites are still sending the data to Facebook, but if you select the universal opt out, none of it will be published. Zuckerberg’s statement clearly says that the data will be deleted:

If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

I continue to believe that Beacon has a lot of power. Now that participants are consenting to publication of the data, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of new uses occur.

Update: Om Malik is parsing the phrase “Facebook won’t store those actions.” He writes, “So essentially he’s saying the information transmitted won’t be stored but will perhaps be interpreted. Will this happen in real time? If that is the case, then the advertising “optimization” that results from “transmissions” is going to continue. Right!”

More on: facebook, privacy, social networking

Frequently in the media the debate gets boiled down to “opt in” vs. “opt out.” The reality is much more complicated than that. There are many nuances between the two.

I spent a lot of time finding the right balance when I was developing social media and search products at AOL. I also have first hand knowledge of privacy disasters as one of the people involved in analyzing and recovering from AOL Search’s data release in 2006.

Facebook’s reason for existence is to distribute information about your personal life to your friends. That’s what has made it popular to the tune of more than 40 million users and a lofty $15 billion valuation. People clearly want to share their information with their friends. Facebook Photos significantly reduces the friction in viewing photos; as a result it has quickly become the number one photo sharing site on the Web.

The problem with Beacon is that it virtually eliminates the friction.

Here are a number of different ways that information can be collected and distributed, starting from the most friction to the least friction:

1. Allow people to indicate in their profile which movies, books, etc. they like. Facebook has long had a space in its profile box for people to enter this information. I suspect (based on the number of times I see feed items about profile changes) that most people touch this once when they set up their account and rarely change it.
2. Allow people to add applications that reflect their interests. Applications such as Flixster, iLike and Virtual Bookshelf are vertically focused. They reduce the friction in entering information about your interests because they tie into content-rich databases. It’s like the difference between an essay question and multiple choice. And it’s a more engaging experience — if I enter a movie on Flixster, it comes pre-populated with the movie poster, actors, director and a capsule summary. But people still have to remember to go do it.
3. Bring in information from other sites using applications. If someone is already using Yelp to write reviews or Google Reader to share interesting blog posts, bring that information in automatically. Before the launch of Beacon, I was using Yelper to import my Yelp reviews and Feedheads to import my shared items from Google Reader. This gets you a steady stream of information on what people are doing elsewhere. It requires people to find the appropriate application and then configure it. Unfortunately, not a lot of people are going to bother. Feedheads has 8,800 users and Yelper has 950.
4. Aggregate information from other sources. You can just ask people to provide their flickr name, YouTube name, etc. AIM Buddy Feeds has been doing this for more than a year. Plaxo is also doing it with Plaxo Pulse. Eliminating the application requirement increases the number of people who will participate. Still, it requires people to come into a form and connect their other accounts.
5. Ask people on partner sites if they want to send their information to Facebook. At the point of purchase, review, comment, etc. ask the user if he wants to send the information. With this approach, the user doesn’t have to manually enter account information, reducing friction. More importantly, they are making the decision at a time when they can see the impact of it. An option to “always send” for a given partner further reduces friction. There are some sources I’m happy to share information from and others that I’m not.
6. Send all of the information automatically and then ask the user if they want to publish it. This is what Facebook Beacon currently does. Facebook gets all of that data and its unclear how unpublished information is used.
7. Send all of the information automatically and publish it by default. This is what Beacon initially did, causing embarrassment for some and ruining surprises for others.

Finding the right level of friction is tricky because people have different tolerances. Most people probably wouldn’t perceive a difference between options 5 and 6, but for me, they are night and day.

This analysis doesn’t take into account development effort involved. It’s often the case that steps that improve user privacy take more time and resources to develop. You can guess what the result is.

More on: facebook, privacy

See also:

• Coke Is Holding Off on Sipping Facebook’s Beacon (New York Times)
• Facebook’s Misrepresentation of Beacon’s Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who opt out or are not logged in (CA Security Advisor Research Blog)

This has caused a couple of concerns:

• Users saw information published that they didn’t necessarily want published. Many people are purchasing Christmas presents and the contents of their orders were put out on their feed, ruining surprises.
• It’s unclear what Facebook does with data that users choose not to publish. Facebook still receives the information from partner sites.

Under the new direction, stories will be sent to Facebook, but will only be published when the user takes an explicit action. That addresses the first concern, but it doesn’t address the second. For all we know, Facebook could be storing that information indefinitely and using that to target ads.

Facebook is all about giving up privacy in exchange for social connectivity. I frequently provide false information when sites ask me about age, gender, etc. Facebook, on the other hand, gets real data because it’s essential to the core function. It’s a tradeoff that I make. But automatically providing transaction-level detail from any partner site is a tradeoff I’m not willing to make.

I’m perfectly happy to have Facebook distribute reviews I write on Yelp. (I was using an application called Yelper to do this before Beacon existed.) But I wouldn’t want Facebook to automatically publish all my reservations on OpenTable (OT is not a partner, this is hypothetical). If I sell an unwanted gift on eBay, I don’t want friends to know about it. Not only do I not want Facebook to publish that information, I don’t want them to get it in the first place.

The biggest problem with Beacon is that there isn’t a clear benefit to the user. It seems like a data grab primarily for marketing purposes. Jason Calacanis’ take on this is well worth reading.

Beacon has a lot of power and can provide a lot more benefit to users than it currently does. I’ll talk more about that in the future.

Update: Om Malik reports that Facebook is deleting information that users choose not to publish.

See also:

• Facebook Beacon 2.0: What You’ll See (TechCrunch)
• Facebook updates Beacon: now truly opt-in (Inside Facebook)
• Feeling Betrayed, Facebook Users Force Site to Honor Their Privacy (washingtonpost.com)
• To Save Its Bacon, Facebook Weakens Beacon (GigaOm)

More on: Facebook, privacy, social networking

This is expanding what many applications already do with Facebook. Applications such as MyFlickr (pictures), Yelper (local reviews), Feedheads (Google Reader), WordPress (blog posts) and others take off-Facebook activity and publish it in your profile and feeds.

With Beacon, when you do something on a partner site — such as write a review, buy a product, win a game — that information gets transmitted to Facebook. You then have the option to publish the information on your Facebook feed. This raises privacy issues. GigaOm and John McKinley offer sharp criticism.

The big question I haven’t seen addressed is what Facebook does with the Becaon data if I don’t choose to publish it. There are brands that people would happily associate themselves with (Timbuk2), others that simply provide utility (Tide) and some that are embarrassing (Preparation H). If I buy Preparation H and tell Facebook I don’t want to publish it, do they still keep track of the fact that I’ve bought it?

With Facebook Beacon, I see the third-party sites being more concerned about the use of the data than users. If I’m Amazon or Netflix, one of my competitive advantages is the database of purchasing habits that I have. Do I really want to give that away?

More on: Facebook

People tagging allows you to uniquely identify people in pictures. Tagging can also be a collaborative effort. When I’ve uploaded pictures with people I don’t know, my friends have filled in the gaps.

Viewers can rollover the picture and the names are displayed.

It’s surprisingly addictive and it forms the basis of the real power of Facebook photos. More on that later.

It also raises privacy issues, beyond those that I discussed yesterday. On flickr, I deliberately don’t include last names because I don’t want the pictures to be searchable in general purpose search engine. I’ve been more comfortable uniquely identifying people in Facebook’s more closed environment.

Still, I wonder about the database that I’m helping to create. Given the enormous popularity of Facebook photos — it’s the number one photo sharing site — it’s likely that Facebook has the largest privately held database of individually identifiable pictures in the country. It would make a great training set for image recognition software. You’ve got uniquely identifiable people in a variety of situations and camera angles.

So far, most public efforts at image recognition haven’t been very successful. Riya, which started out as a visual people search tool, used tags and other metadata to help improve the results. Even that wasn’t good enough. Riya has largely refocused on identifying merchandise.

The New York Times has a piece on the intersection of social networks, privacy rights and intellectual property. Virgin Mobile in Australia used a picture of Alison Chang posted on flickr as part of a billboard. The picture had been uploaded by photographer Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who assigned a Creative Commons license, allowing for commercial use of his picture.

Under U.S. law (which I don’t think would apply in this case), there are two separate issues. One is the rights of the photographer who took the picture. It seems that in case, the license provided by Wong allowed for use by Virgin Mobile. The other issue is the the rights of the person in the photo. Generally speaking, your picture cannot be used for commercial purposes without your consent. It can however be used for editorial purposes; if you’re at a news event, a newspaper or TV station doesn’t have to have your permission to show you.

Of course, this brings up the issue of defining “commercial purposes” and “consent.” Is Google Street View a commercial use? What if they put ads around the Street View images? Many semi-public places like sports arenas and theme parks state (often in fine print on the back of your ticket) that you give consent to commercial use of your likeness by entering. These same places prohibit you from using pictures that you take inside for commercial purposes.

I’ve thought a lot about these two issues as I’ve uploaded pictures to flickr. I typically post pictures with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. People are free to use my pictures for noncommercial purposes, as long as they credit me. They can also make derivative works, as long as those works are also shared. In two cases that I know of, my pictures have appeared in print publications.

The other issue is privacy. I try to edit out (or at least mark private) any images that might be embarrassing to my friends. I don’t include people’s last names in the tags or descriptions to prevent directed searches. I’ve had a couple of requests to take down or edit images of friends, which I honor.

License plates are among the possible privacy concerns Helft cites:

There was the picture of a clearly identifiable man standing in front of an establishment offering lap dances and other entertainment in San Francisco. The site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

Others pointed to pictures of cars whose license plates were clearly readable. One pointed to images captured inside the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, a controversial location for photography in this high-security era. On Lombard Street in San Francisco, various tourists who had come to photograph the famously curvy street were photographed themselves.

He notes that Google worked with the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence to remove pictures of shelters.

I think the privacy issues here are limited. The images are devoid of most context. You don’t when or why someone was in a particular place. From the picture above, all you can tell is that someone who drives a Civic Hybrid with the plates “I (heart) 51 MPG” parked near Google.

But you could get the same information (and more) driving down the street.

As it turns out, I found the same car on flickr. That picture includes a time stamp. (It’s possible the two were taken the same day; a black Acura TL is parked in front of it, just like in the picture above.)

Yahoo! employees have been using flickr to embarrass bad parkers. This picture of a scooter parked in a carpool spot is one of my favorites.

Still, from a privacy standpoint, I prefer the fuzzier images that appear in Google’s Street View outside the Bay Area. Google did its own imaging in the Bay Area and licensed images from Immersive Media for other markets. In New York, I had a much harder time making out faces or signs. The pictures are clear enough to get a feel for an area without the high level of detail you find in San Francisco.

More on: Google, maps