What You Don't Know About Facebook

It may be more sinister than you think.

By Eric Osguthorpe, Clemson University
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Source: http://campusprogress.org/features/769/what-you-dont-know-about-facebook

A version of this article originally appeared in The Clemson Forum, a Campus Progress sponsored publication.


Facebook. It used to be an actual book, handed out by your college, with pictures of fellow incoming freshman. Now, it’s the social networking site that’s sitting right behind MySpace in the internet popularity contest. And while there is a chance that you aren’t already a member, 80% of students at Facebook-recognized college campuses are.

What are you missing out on? A great procrastination tool, a good reason (i.e. your hot lab partner’s recommendation) to buy Sufjan Stevens’s latest album, and a potentially huge invasion of your privacy.

Surprise, surprise. Though users understand that untold thousands are browsing through personal profiles and photos on the Facebook, many aren’t aware of its interesting suite of backers and the specifics of its privacy policy.

Go ahead – take a gander at it. You’ll find a few red flags:

“We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.”
“We may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law or to protect our interests or property. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”

“Facebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site.”

So, exactly which groups may be accessing our information? Here are a couple of those companies:

Well, VanguardPAC board member Peter Thiel provided venture capital to the Facebook to the tune of a cool $500,000. Daily Kos describes VanguardPAC, as a “wingnut PAC.” (The title of a recent petition urging the confirmation of Justice Alito was titled “ Confirm Judge Alito, or Face America’s Wrath!”) The stated mission of this highly conservative group is “to help create a farm team of activists and candidates across America ready and able to take leadership, from the lowest level to the highest, effectively implementing the ideas of liberty.”

The Accel Group invested $10 million. Members of its board previously have been associated with In-Q-Tel, BBN Technologies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In-Q-Tel is a venture capital fund formed in 1999 to help the CIA identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that could serve the interests of the United States. DARPA once had a project called the Information Awareness Office whose mission was vast information gathering.

According to the November 9, 2002, New York Times, the system proposed by the DARPA project, known as Total Information Awareness (TIA) would have permitted “a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from their individual computers.” The Information Awareness Office and the proposed TIA caught the attention of conspiracy theorists and civil liberties activists alike, not least of all for its logo – an eye-in-pyramid symbol, with the eye of Providence staring down at the Earth, and the Latin motto scientia est potential: “knowledge is power.” Before it was disbanded in 2003, TIA was amended in May of that year to become Terrorist Information Awareness. Though the Information Awareness Office is no longer in existence, the whole thing seems a precursor to endless government privacy intrusions that have come in the wake of September 11th, including the domestic wiretapping debate currently underway.

With investors whose goal is building radical right-wing farm teams and the involvement of government agencies focused on complete information gathering, is Facebook, which contains the personal information of millions of US citizens, less innocuous than we think? Users of web communities like Facebook are responsible for knowing what they’re getting into, so now you know. Take a look at what’s happening nationwide.

One lucky Oklahoma student who posted an unsavory comment about President Bush received a friendly Secret Service visit. Saul Martinez, a sophomore member of a “Bush Sucks” Facebook group, responded to another student’s assertion that his pet fish would make a better President, posting a comment along the lines of “Or we could all donate a dollar and raise millions of dollars to hire an assassin to kill the president and replace him with a monkey." Four months later, Martinez found himself being questioned by a secret service agent who thought he might be a trained assassin.

Cameron Walker, Student Government President at Fisher College, posted comments on Facebook about a campus police officer whom he felt was antagonizing students. He encouraged students to sign a petition to oust the officer, or to “set him up,” leading to the statement that apparently set off alarms for school administrators. Walker wrote, “He’s got to do something wrong, in either case, he’s gotta foul up at some point… anyone willing to get arrested?" Though clearly not a threat, the school expelled Walker, arguing that he was “found to be in violation of the Student Guide and Code of Conduct."

At Penn State last year, University Police used Facebook to identify and prosecute fans who rushed the football field after a big win against Ohio State. Officers looked at pictures posted in students’ online photo albums, video footage from the field and member groups from Facebook to identify as many fans as possible. One student, who police identified from her online photo album as one of the offending students, was told that she could face up to 2 years in jail and a $2,000 fine from the University.

My advice: let your fellow coeds know that you enjoy greenery, gin n’ tonics & Jack Johnson when you’re hanging out, but don’t put it on the Facebook for Big Brother to see.



For more on your personal privacy and group sites, check out our previous article on schools looking into students’ MySpace accounts.

Text messaging boom leads to digit damage

(From Akiel)

Wednesday, February 22, 2006; Posted: 8:28 p.m. EST (01:28 GMT)

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Mobile telephone text messaging has become so popular in Britain that millions of users now suffer injuries to their thumbs and fingers because of their love of keeping in touch, according to a survey on Tuesday.

Over 93.5 million text messages are sent every day but all this digit action has lead to an explosion in people reporting cases of repetitive strain injury (RSI).

Thirty-eight percent more people suffer from sore wrists and thumbs due to texting than five years ago and 3.8 million people now complain of text-related injuries every year.

The survey for Virgin Mobile found the texting phenomenon shows no sign of slowing. Over 12 percent of the population admit to sending 20 texts per day and 10 percent confess to sending up to 100 texts every day.

While psychologists say it is important for people to communicate there is a danger that using arms-length tools like texting and email is making people uncomfortable with more intimate face-to-face conversations.

There has even been concern voiced that some people run the risk of becoming addicted to excessive texting.

Last March Scottish factory worker Craig Crosbie was crowned the world's fastest texter after he took just 48 seconds to type out the 160-character message: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."

Connected and cut off

It's a modern quandary for adults: Technology keeps teens in touch with one another - and their parents totally in the dark.


By Jeff Gammage
Philadelphia Inquirer 2/21/2006

Back in the Stone Age, that is, the 1990s, if a young man wanted to date a young woman, he had to work through her parents: Call the house, be polite when mom or dad answered the phone, make small talk when he arrived at their door.

No more.

These days, technology is excising parents from the equation - and they don't like it a bit.

Today the interaction is more often conducted teen to teen via cell phone, text messaging, and instant messaging. That makes it harder for parents to know who their kids are spending time with - not just as dates, but as friends.

"He's telling me he doesn't have to go through the parents, when he has such easy access through the phone," says Lawrenceville, N.J., mother Vicki Russo, whose 13-year-old son, Max, is beginning to discover the opposite sex. "I say, 'It's out of respect, so they know who their daughter is seeing.'

"I am definitely considered a dinosaur."

Of course, teenagers have talked on the phone for as long as there have been phones and teenagers. And there have always been kids with private lines in their bedrooms. What's changed is that the technology of personal communication has become relatively cheap, infinitely varied and nearly universal.

"Gone are the days when parents can at least hear the voices, if not see the faces, of the company our kids keep," says Jenifer Lippincott, a Boston-area learning consultant and coauthor of 7 Things Your Teenager Won't Tell You (And How to Talk About Them Anyway).

Instant messaging can seem futuristic to people who communicated by passing notes in class. But to teens, Lippincott says, IMs have become an everyday means of conversation, the way to find out the details of a breakup, the location of a party, the plans for Friday night.

Max Russo "can't go over to anybody's house unless I know where he's going," his mother says, "but he knows a ton of kids who I don't know, because they're IMing each other. I define the relationship as, 'Your friends are people who come here.' He defines it as people he IMs."

•

To parents it can sometimes seem that their teenagers already know the kind of people they want to be: grouchy, easily offended loners.

To the kids, adolescence is a time of baffling transformation - hormones raging, voices changing, hairs sprouting. They are trying on different beliefs and attitudes, figuring out what they think about the world and their place in it.

The fact is, adolescence is difficult for everyone involved. It's a time when teens want more independence - but not full responsibility. When they want to be appreciated as individuals - but still belong to the group. They want to make their own decisions - but need parental backup if things go wrong.

Layered atop that turbulence are technological advances that give kids real power to assert their independence. Mom and Dad may insist on keeping the family computer in the living room, but a text-messaging conversation can be conducted anytime from anywhere through a cell phone.

And understanding the technology doesn't necessarily help parents. Karen Levy is a recruiting manager for an information-technology firm, and her husband, Laurent, is a veteran IT consultant. Still, she says, they found out only after the fact that their 18-year-old daughter had driven to a date with a young man they didn't know.

"I never even met this guy," says the Yardley mother. "I expected him to pick her up... . I was pretty upset about it."

Many parents also say they're puzzled by the all-consuming attraction of instant messaging. Their kids rush through the door after school, drop their books on a counter and log on - sending instant messages to the same kids they saw half an hour ago.

"My daughter, who never talked to boys, is constantly IMing boys," says Helene Dubin, a Lawrenceville, N.J., nutritionist.

But there are good reasons why teens prefer to communicate online. To understand, you need to talk to an expert. Somebody like Randy Schur. He just turned 15.

•

In the old days, the act of calling a girl on the phone required a certain bravery, because it was so revealing.

The moment she picked up the line, she knew why you were calling: You were interested in her. You wouldn't have phoned if you weren't.

Today, instant messaging offers a much more casual means of contact, all but erasing the threat of rejection.

"They know why you're talking, but you can always 'just be talking,' " says Schur, a student at Haverford High School. "On IM, you could just be bored, so you picked someone to talk to. Calling someone is really deliberate. It's a lot more personal."

Instant messages also offer greater privacy, he adds, because conversations take place in a kind of shorthand computerese, unintelligible to the uninitiated.

"Some people never write an entire word," Schur says. "Some write only in abbreviations."

For instance, "A3" means anytime, anyplace, anywhere. "YBS" means you'll be sorry and "PMBI" translates as pardon my butting in. No teen could survive without dashing off an occasional "POS," alerting their friends that there is a parent over shoulder.

Researchers who study adolescence say young people are more at ease discussing emotions and attractions online. Text offers distance and separation, eliminating the risk of embarrassment or awkwardness in a face-to-face conversation, says Cheryl Dellasega, professor of women's studies at Pennsylvania State University and author of Surviving Ophelia: Mothers Share Their Wisdom in Navigating the Tumultuous Teenage Years.

But texting presents quandaries, too. Schur, a musician active in high school bands, says the advantage of instant messaging is also its disadvantage: It's impersonal.

"There's no body language," he says. "There's not even how your voice is."

Which led him to this insight:

"If you want a girl to like you, you probably should talk to them."

•

Today the Internet is used by 17 million youths ages 12 through 17 - fully 73 percent of all those in the age bracket, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And two-thirds of American teens communicate through instant messaging. It has replaced the cell phone as their preferred mode of connecting with friends, according to a new study in Reading Research Quarterly.

Not surprising, says Trish McDermott, chief matchmaker at www.engage.com, a dating Web site. Practically every technical innovation has been used to enhance contact between the sexes. The invention of the railroad meant people could date outside of their immediate surroundings, the car created intimate backseat romances, the telephone made it possible to reach out and touch someone.

Heck, she says, in the 1800s, telegraph operators used to flirt through dots and dashes. Today's youths are using what's available to them.

"The computer is the way he's in touch with his friends," says Ann Ellen Dickter, Randy Schur's mom. "They pick up a computer the way we might have picked up the phone."

If Robots Ever Get Too Smart, He'll Know How to Stop Them

The New York Times

February 14, 2006
By CORNELIA DEAN

In Isaac Asimov's collection of stories, "I, Robot," robots rise up against humanity.

In the classic sci-fi thriller "Blade Runner," a bounty hunter must exterminate intelligent androids that are both deadly and very unhappy with their creators.

Even in 1920, when the playwright Karel Capek gave English speakers the Czech word "robot" (laborer) in his play "R.U.R.," the androids at Rossum's Universal Robots were bent on wiping out the human race.

"If popular culture has taught us anything," Daniel H. Wilson says, "it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace." Luckily, Dr. Wilson is just the guy to help us do it.

In his new book, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising," Dr. Wilson offers detailed — and hilariously deadpan — advice on evading hostile swarms of robot insects (don't try to fight — "loss of an individual robot is inconsequential to the swarm"); outsmarting your "smart" house (be suspicious if the house suggests you test the microwave by putting your head in it); escaping unmanned ground vehicles (drive in circles — they'll have a harder time tracking you); and surviving hand-to-hand combat with a humanoid (smear yourself with mud to disguise your distinctive human thermal signature and go for the "eyes" — its cameras).

If all else fails, reasoning with a robot may work, Dr. Wilson says, but emotional appeals will fall on deaf sensors.

Should you prevail, he offers in a grim addendum: "Have no mercy. Your enemy doesn't."

But he is no foe of robots, Dr. Wilson said in a telephone interview from Portland, Ore., where he is living while he waits for Paramount to decide whether to make a sci-fi comedy out of the book, which it has optioned.

A native of Tulsa, Okla., he earned his doctorate in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, a major center for research in the field, just as his book (robotuprising.com) was coming out late last year.

And his thesis describes a version of the smart house, a dwelling so rich in sensors that it would monitor people's activities and raise an alarm if their movements changed or stopped. He said he was inspired to investigate the possibilities of such "assisted intelligent environments" by his mother, a nurse who organizes care for elderly people who want to remain in their own homes — or "age in place," as Dr. Wilson put it.

Unlike Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who has written on the robot menace, he does not view robotics as contributing to what Mr. Joy called "the further perfection of pure evil."

In fact, he said, he wrote the book out of annoyance with the way the popular media portrayed robots. "I was kind of tired of them getting a bad rap," he said. "In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing."

So he decided to mine popular culture — science fiction books and movies, even "R.U.R." — for scenarios of robot uprisings. Then he talked to researchers around the world about how plausible they might be, and about the state of robot technology generally. He found them "surprisingly eager to put themselves into these made-up situations."

But if the scenarios are outlandish (so far) the information is real. By the time readers have absorbed all the possible technological advances rebellious robots could exploit, they have taken a tour of the world's robotics labs, where, Dr. Wilson maintains, all of the techniques and tools in the book already exist or are under development.

For example, he recalled, when he asked his adviser at Carnegie Mellon, Chris Atkeson, how large a walking robot could be, the question provoked a lively discussion in the lab, ending with a consensus that they could probably be no taller than a telephone pole. The next question was, "How would you take one down?"

Actually, making walking robots fall down is one current focus for Dr. Atkeson, whose voice acquires a comically sinister edge as he describes the humanoids in his lab. One goal of the work is to understand what happens when people, particularly older people, fall. "Right now we are trying to make robots fall down the same way people do," he said. "We can very reliably get our robots to fall down; like people do is a little harder."

Contributions from leading roboticists elsewhere in the world also found their way into the book. For example, Dr. Wilson said, foiling speech recognition can be as simple as altering one's accent, or capitalizing on background noise — problems actual robot researchers are striving now to overcome. So the anti-robot tactics the book recommends boil down to exploiting current weaknesses in robot design, Dr. Wilson said.

"If you read between the lines you can see all the advice is where researchers are working very hard," he said.

When Dr. Wilson started writing the book, he was still a graduate student. "Initially it made me nervous," Dr. Atkeson said, in part because he feared other researchers would not respect anyone who took such a zany approach to his work and then presented it to a popular audience. Dr. Wilson himself said he feared some readers might not get the joke.

"But the book turned out very nicely," Dr. Atkeson said. People will pick it up because it is funny — "and then you have an opportunity to educate them. It's a robotics primer."

In any event, Dr. Wilson is hardly heeding his own warnings. In fact, he is looking for a job in commercial robotics research. He is also working on a second book, tentatively titled "Where's My Jetpack?" about various technological marvels that were proposed with great fanfare but never panned out.

And in his own life, he said, he does not feel too threatened by robots. "If you want to worry about something, worry about humans," said Dr. Wilson, who is 27 and single. "Humans are much more dangerous."

Meanwhile, though, robots continue their march toward world domination. Just last week a troop of them, produced by "an art robotic collective" called Botmatrix, took up residence in a downtown theater in the play "Heddatron," in which they kidnap an Ypsilanti, Mich., housewife and force her to perform Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler."

As Dr. Miller put it in his book: "You probably found 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising' in the humor section. Let's just hope that is where it belongs."