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Wednesday, February 18, 2015

DATA MINING

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Data Mining term was born in 1990 and is continuously practiced by statisticians in order to generate new information to figure out better ways in generating sales.

If a company wants to target men aged 24-30 who live in Ontario and have an interest in motorsport and television, then Facebook can tell the company exactly how many of its Ontario users fit that criteria and will be advertised to. 

Facebook gets this information from the data that its users enter on their profile pages; their age, location, interests, job, educations and what they 'Like' is all used to target relevant adverts to users.

Facebook’s Data mining can be useful, if it uses the data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain national issue and the response can be further broken down by gender and location. Survey results can be addressed to government as a Voice of the public to aid them to take further action.

But the possibility of data mining by private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook has been a concern, for an instance on December 14, 2005, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students were able to download, using an automated script, over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard University) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published.

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Facebook is also selling the users information to third parties which provides deep insights that help them deliver the right offers to their customers at the right time; On October’2014, Facebook agreed a 2year-contract with Master card to data to data mine the Asia-Pacific users information to get consumer behaviour information it can sell to banks. This means Master card can skim through the users ‘likes’ and conversations.



Though Facebook privacy settings provides an option for us to restrict the party access by turning on the privacy settings, Data mining could be potential privacy concern in the future.

FACEBOOK'S BUG BOUNTY


FACEBOOK’S BUG BOUNTY :

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A bug bounty program is a deal offered Facebook by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to exploits and vulnerabilities. Since 2011, Facebook has been paying monetary rewards to researchers who report flaws that could compromise the integrity or privacy of user data or could enable access to systems within its infrastructure. Find below one of the recent legitimate case which received a reward.

FACEBOOK’S BUG BOUNTY NOTICE

“If you believe you have found a security vulnerability on Facebook, we encourage you to let us know right away. We will investigate all legitimate reports and do our best to quickly fix the problem. Before reporting though, please review this page including our responsible disclosure policy, reward guidelines, and those things that should not be reported.”

FACEBOOK PHOTOS HACKED & VULNERABILITY EXPOSED BY YOUNG GEEKS.
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22 year old student from India, Laxman Muthiyah was able to delete photo album of any Facebook user, using just 4 lines of codes. Laxman was playing around with Facebook’s Graph API and Facebook Access Tokens, when suddenly he discovered this vulnerability. All needed was the unique access token which is assigned to every Facebook profile, which appears in the URL of all photos, albums and posts of that user. Or, in layman’s language, album deleted. Considering that he had no evil intentions, he immediately contacted Facebook’s security team, which responded within 2 hours, and rectified this security flaw.

The Facebook Bug Bounty Program, which rewards such reporting of security flaws recognized the awesome work done by Laxman, and rewarded him with $12,500

There are more than 350 million images uploaded everyday on Facebook, and there are 1.2 billion users of this website. Imagine the mayhem and destruction which Laxman could have done from this exploit. $12,500 reward, is actually only a fraction of what could have been the consequences.

In 2014, Facebook paid bug bounties totaling $1.3 million to 321 researchers from 65 countries. The average reward was $1,788 and the top three countries where valid bug reports originated were India, with 196 submissions; Egypt, with 81 and the U.S. with 61.

Bug bounty program allow the developers to discover and resolve bugs before the general public is aware of them, preventing incidents of widespread abuse.

INSTANT PERSONALIZATION


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Facebook Instant Personalization was launched in April of 2010 and is now gradually being rolled out. In practice, how this works is, if you are logged into Facebook from within a browser session and then visit one of the Facebook Instant Personalization partner sites, you’ll receive a notification the first time that “personalization” is going on. You will be prompted with the option to disable it, and if you don’t, Facebook instant personalization will run and personalize that partner website to you based on information from your Facebook profile. 

According to Facebook, “Your information can only be used to present you with a more personalized experience and cannot be transferred to advertisers or used for any other purposes.”
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For an instant, if you have stated through Facebook interest page that ‘I like Musical art, Bryan Adams ‘Summer of 69’. If you visit the any of the online Radio site like Pandora, the first song you will hear is ‘Summer of 69’ or something that Pandora thinks is similar to your Musical interests and personalize the further browsing experience. 

 Many of us entirely unaware the feature even exists. However, this raises concerns with the potential for targeted adverts and more of your data handed out to other websites. As of now only certain sites can access this, and permissions need to be granted to do this. This can be turn it off in Privacy settings.

 Since Facebook is a free service to its users, some would agree that it’s reasonable for Facebook to offer targeted advertising to enrich their ad-supported business model and available advertising inventory. The concept behind Instant Personalization is compelling: it offers the promise of a personalized web, where sites know what you’re interested in as soon as you arrive. But it’s rife with privacy issues.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

PRIVACY CONCERNS WITH FACE BOOK APPLICATIONS (GAMES, MESSENGER)

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In Facebook, 3rd party "Apps" are pieces of software that let Facebook's 500 million users play games or share common interests with one another. Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies [2].


At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. 
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In the recent past, Facebook’s released statements that it had found several Facebook applications were “providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names” to advertisers and Internet tracking companies. The report said that all 10 of the most popular applications on Facebook, including games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, were transmitting user IDs to third parties. Three of those applications were also transmitting information about a user’s friends. The Facebook games also seem to be against privacy and security as they encourage users to connect with a lot of people they don’t really know. For an instant, Farmville game encourages this by making level ups easier by having more Farmville neighbors, same goes to Mafia Wars and Café World.



The new Facebook Messenger app has many people concerned because the app can access their personal information and record conversations without notifying users. The app will also be able to access your contact list, and see your phone call log including who you called and how long the call lasted. Downloading the app also gives permission for Facebook to send photos back and forth. Facebook says it has disabled thousands of applications at times for violating its policies. Its unclear how many, if any, of those cases involved passing user information to marketing companies.

EXPERTS VIEW ON PRIVACY IN FACEBOOK


[Video Source: Wall street Journal]

 It seems like going forward we need to accept that privacy is dead and that we now live in an open world or we can challenge this notion and continue to fight for privacy. Our information is already out there and regardless of how hard we scream that we want it back or want it to be secure, it’s not going to happen ever. If not Facebook, some other social networking tool is going to expose you, so In the future We are going to see a shift towards more openness, more transparency, and less privacy.

As we witnessed, Facebook has been hit with a string of controversies over privacy. After a series of complaints from some users and privacy advocates, the company made wholesale changes to its privacy settings. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, apologized to users, saying that some of the site’s privacy settings had become too complicated for the average user to understand. But they are putting as best as they can do for the mutual benefit.

The internet is a free for all between the good guys and the bad guys with ordinary people caught in between. Facebook is no different. The best we can do to protect our privacy, is avoid putting the personal data in any of the social networking site and protect each other as best as we can.

Although Facebook provide us with privacy settings, such that we can configure our account to only allow our friends to view our posts, I don’t think it’s sufficient to guarantee that your data only visible by people whom you want to. Well, it can never be foolproof when we’re talking about the internet. Many ways for people to gather information about us in this social networking world. If we really want a privacy, we should stay away from all the social networking sites. After all Facebook is one of free social networking site, If not Facebook, some other online social networking tool ( Instagram, Twitter, My space, Linkedin) is going to expose us. Facebook is trying it's best to provide us the better control over our Privacy with the ever evolving privacy policies and settings.

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[2] Bottomline is as Steve Rambam, a private investigator specializing in Internet privacy cases, says, "Privacy is dead – get over it". "Appeal of online services is to broadcast personal information on purpose."

TIMELINE OF FACEBOOK PRIVACY POLICY


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Facebook was officially launched on Feb 4, 2004 as a private space for communication with a group of your choice, over the years it has attained a tremendous growth in users and business partners and transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default.

Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

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To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. As the users network grows the privacy concerns and privacy policy also gets growing.


Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As the Facebook’s business partners network increases, the more and more of Face book’s users' information is shared and privacy issues and subsequent policies revisions are inevitable.
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[1] Lawsuits against the Facebook’s privacy concerns are also increasing trend. Recently Austrian student Max Schrems has launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook, claiming that Facebook's monitoring of a user's activity is in violation of European Union laws. More boldly, he claims Facebook cooperates with the U.S. surveillance scheme Prism. The case will request $667 in damages for the first 25,000 members of the class. Thus far, 25,000 Facebook users have signed up as participants to this class. When hese kind of lawsuits against privacy concerns piled up as a force, Facebook will revise their privacy policy and provide additional options for its users to limit their publically available data.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once said "When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?' And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.

FACEBOOK PRIVACY : USERS SURVEY

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Let’s see some of the interesting Facebook’s privacy related survey's outcome in an infographics way. Info-graphics is a familiar way of visually representing the complex interconnected information, data or knowledge quickly and clearly to everyone. Source for all below mentioned figures from (website). Since all the data’s are from unauthorized source, there could be discrepancy with the actual figures. Since this post is all about discussion on privacy, all the figures explained in the infographics are supported with reasonable assertion.
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-  61 % of users have said they don’t trust Facebook, after all it is a social networking where we may get a chance to know about many unknown persons. Since Facebook is social networking site obviously the trust is on low side.
-  68 % of the users don’t seems to understand the privacy settings. Due complexity and size of the “Privacy policy agreement”, Most of the users don’t have time (or) not spending time to go through all of it.
-  28% of the users only have expressed that Privacy in Facebook is importance. This is the base idea behind Facebook’s creation, Facebook is a social networking site, and those who wants to connect with friends and intended to make new friends all across world are not much concerned about privacy.
-  28% of users shall all their posts with more than just friends. Facebook users are keen to express their views and comments of social and personal issues in an open post and let the world know who they are.
-  91% of the employees are hired after their social media page is screened and Facebook holds a high percentage share of 65% than linkedin 63% in this screening practice.


All the above said figures may not be 100% accurate, but this is the general trend and all it says is majority of the users are taking Facebook as social media platform and not expecting much on their privacy.

FACEBOOK PRIVACY AND SECURITY SETTINGS

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Maintaining privacy on Facebook is important because recruiters, teachers, bosses and college admission committees are highly likely to look at your profile and make judgments about your professionalism based on what they can see.

Facebook has more than a billion users who share photos, stream videos, and post status updates regarding their daily lives.Since its launch, Facebook has been a target for criticism regarding its open approach to user privacy, especially its decision to share rather than hide your personal information by default.

There are many ways to customize your privacy and security on Facebook, but here are 10 tips to get you started, all these changes can be done in the Facebook privacy settings.

1.) Set up who can see your future posts.
Go to your “Privacy” settings under “Account Settings” and select “Who can see my future posts?”

2.) Review posts that friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline?
Go to the “Timeline and Tagging” within “Account Settings.” You will notice a section there called “Who can add things to my timeline?”

3.) Create a default list of friends that you want to prevent from seeing your whole profile.
Combine Tips 1 & 2 and create a restricted group to prevent them from seeing your profile.

4.) Block people from seeing your friends list, your followers and people/lists you follow.
Go to “Timeline and Tagging” under “Account Settings.” “Who can add things to my timeline?” You can customize this feature by selecting “Friends” or “Only Me.”

5.) Edit privacy for specific photo albums.
Go to your profile and select “Photos.” From there, click on “Albums.” At the bottom-right of each photo album, you will see an icon that controls who exactly can see that specific album.

6.) Prevent Facebook from detecting your face when your friends upload photos.
Go to the “Timeline and Tagging” section under “Account Settings.” Click on Edit next to where it says “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?” Select “No One”.

7.) How to disable website instant personalization.
Go to your “Account Settings” and then clicking on “Apps.” Scroll down to where it says “Instant personalization” and remove the checkmark where it says “Enable instant personalization on partner websites”.

8.) Block people from seeing you on Facebook entirely
Go to your “Account Settings” and selecting “Blocking.” This feature is under “Block users.”

9.) Block your profile from search engines.
Go to “Account Settings” and then selecting “Privacy.” Go to the section that says “Do you want other search engines to link to your timeline?” under “Who can look me up?” Remove the checkmark where it says “Let other search engines link to your timeline.”

10.) Have you been hacked? Here’s how you get your account back.
You can get your account back by visiting https://www.facebook.com/help/hacked and following the instructions.

Monday, February 16, 2015

ONLINE PRIVACY

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Online privacy is a broad term referring to the various concerns, technologies, and strategies for protecting information, communications, and choices that are meant to be private. Disclosure of individually identifiable information can occur deliberately or accidentally and can occur within an organization or be the result of an external breach of security. When people post personal information on social network sites, that information may be used in ways they do not realize.

A REAL EXAMPLE OF WHY FACEBOOK PRIVACY IS A PROBLEM : 

 OPEN BOOK (SEARCH ENGINE) :

OpenBook is an enhanced search tool for Facebook to find stuff you don’t want people to find out about you, which helps harvests unprotected information that people post on their Facebook pages.

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Openbook enabled one to search for specific texts on the walls of Facebook subscribers which they had denoted, knowingly or unknowingly, as being available to "Everyone," i.e. to the Internet at large. It was built by San Francisco website developers Will Moffat, Peter Burns and James Home within a few hours on May 12, 2010, and received nearly six million page views in its first two weeks on-line from over a million people in over two hundred countries.

In May 2012, the website was moved from its original domain youropenbook.org to openbook.org. In July 2012, Openbook was shut down due to legal reasons. Facebook itself now provides the same capacity to search Facebook pages for a word or phrase for logged in users.

OpenBook is a powerful statement and illustration for why privacy matters. Perhaps the fault lies with the people who carelessly post potentially embarrassing information about themselves but one cannot deny possible negative repercussions. As employers use the Internet to do background checks and colleges scouring information about potential new students, one cannot be too cavalier about their public or private information.

Sunday, February 15, 2015

INTRODUCTION


Dear Readers,

I am Suresh Ganesan, Masters student (MEng - Automotive) at The University of Windsor, Canada. Professional blog writing is part of my curriculum for the Management Information Systems course instructed by Dr.Gokul Bhandari. 

Till now, I don't have any experience in professional blog writing. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step and let this be my first step for My Blog writting  and the theme for my blog is "Privacy in Facebook". 

As we sense it, Social networking is everywhere these days. It’s next to impossible to find someone who doesn't have a Facebook account. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with unknown people. All the social networking mediums are vouched to provide a flawless security and Privacy to their users because privacy is a fundamental human right, cannot be violated under any circumstances.  In my blog posts, the reality of Privacy in Facebook will be presented with facts and figures in a layman's term.



Citation for the images, videos, figures, info-graphics, case studies and survey results will be specified at the footer on each posts with the visited date. This blog is intended for educational purpose, in case of any copyright violation and discrepancy in the presented information, please let me know at your earliest convenience.


I am open to suggestions to improve this blog writing experience. Please feel free to register your Comments and provide your feedback to make this Journey a successful one. Lets get started with a simple video on Privacy in Facebook.

Glimpse of Privacy in Facebook.

(Video Courtesy : Youtube & BuzzFeedVideo)


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