Although Gen Y may be more willing to post revealing information than their elders, some are also more controlling of it. “The Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves”.  The Project also found that teenagers obscure their physical locations and personal data online. In the words of a 19 year old university student, “I have to look out for me.”  A University of California study showed that most 18-24 year olds are actually “in harmony with older Americans regarding concerns about online privacy, norms, and policy suggestions.”

Yet Gen Y’s “aspiration[s] for increased privacy” do not always match their participation “in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data”. They mix caution with carelessness and a desire to connect. Some Gen Y believe the sheer volume of personal information published online provides anonymity and they will only be identified by positive connections who want to collaborate or open career paths for them. This naivety can be dangerous. As I wrote in “Is online privacy an illusion?”, seemingly harmless information shared online can be used to deduce your movie rentals, political affiliation, and, (alarmingly) your social security number.

So why aren’t Gen Y acting on their privacy concerns? In short, they don’t understand the limits of privacy law. Gen Y are “more likely to believe that the law protects them both online and off. This lack of knowledge in a tempting environment, rather than a cavalier lack of concern regarding privacy” explains their behavior.

Consider this:

•    Netflix inadvertently revealed the identities of some of their subscribers even though they removed personally identifying information from their publically available database. Two University of Texas researchers were able to match Netflix subscribers’ to their reviews of vulnerable movies on sites like IMDB.

•    Another discovery out of the University of Texas, this time involving an assistant professor and his student, was that peoples’ political affiliations can be inferred from social networks. Group membership, music preference, and friendship connections were particularly indicative of political affiliation. The dataset for this experiment was 167,000 online profiles and 3 million ‘friends’ in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

•    Even those who are unconcerned that others can see their movie rental records, or know their political persuasion, would be upset if their social security numbers were uncovered. Another duo of researchers, in this case from Carnegie Mellon University, were able to destabilize the Social Security numbers of 8.5% of US citizens born from 1989 to 2003 based on publically available data including social network profiles.

As Maneesha Mithal of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division stated in The New York Times, “Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete…You can find out who an individual is without it.”

So do we need to protect the next generation of Internet contributors, those born since 1995 referred to as Gen Z? In The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution Scott Snyder writes that Gen Z are the most likely generation to accept reduced privacy in order to participate in the “immersive, ‘user-centric’ wireless experiences” delivered by 4G mobiles. Encouragingly, this generation is demonstrating an ability to engage and minimize their public exposure. Regulatory body Ofcom’s media literacy audit found that a full quarter of 8-12 year old UK citizens have social networking profiles on Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo. A vast majority of this active quarter, 83%, have set their privacy settings to only allow their friends to see their profiles.

I think Gen Z will be just fine; we don’t need to instill a mistrust of academics that travel in twos or teach them about the interrelated nature of the Internet. Let’s concentrate on ourselves and realize that by placing our first name on one site and our last name on another site we’re effectively placing our full name in the same place.

• auto generation of follower lists from individuals’ private email and chat behavior
• auto completion of some email addresses in a feature similar to Twitter’s @reply
• auto connection to Google Reader and Picasa Web Albums.

Google responded to privacy concerns within days. However, for some who had very real privacy concerns, this simply wasn’t good enough.

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

There’s still a lot to learn about how we integrate privacy into new products, but we know the golden rule – personal information should never be published without personal consent.

Update: US Congressmen have asked the Federal Trade Commission to examine complaints about Google Buzz.

What does it mean to have this many web pages mapped? You can now sort more of your search results by their relevance to your profile!

The number of links keeps doubling as we collectively visit an increasing variety of webpages. A half million links were mapped by April 2009, 1 million by June 2009, and now we’ve mapped 2 million!

Thank you for contributing to this grand experiment. As we create a virtual topography of the World Wide Web together, let us know if your profile has led you to web pages you wouldn’t have found otherwise or if anything isn’t working for you.

You can enrich your own experience by matching your DNA profile with people you know, or asking them to give feedback on your profile.

The Facebook blog is a hotbed for complaints. As Peter ‘mos Undef’ Mann observed, since the new settings were rolled out, Facebook users have had to navigate six distinct versions of what aspects of our friends lists we can protect and how to set those restrictions.

Well Facebook, you fooled me once with Beacon, and now you’ve fooled me twice with your new privacy settings. Please don’t fool me again – make the profit you’re entitled to, just don’t invade my privacy or my friends’ privacy to do so.

Beacon, which shared sensitive data across users’ Facebook profiles, has been a disaster from the start, causing outrage over incidents like broadcasting the price paid for an engagement ring — before the ring had been presented. In response to the widespread backlash, (the “How dare you betray me?” response we’ve detailed in previous posts) Facebook has had to backpedal dramatically. First they switched from case-by-case opt-out to permanent opt-out, then to opt-in only, and finally they canceled the program altogether.

Facebook still doesn’t get it; they don’t have to invade your privacy to deliver ads which are meant for you. Until Facebook learns that they can give you what you want without tracking you, they are under-serving you.

This ability has some pretty impressive applications for a range of fields. In online advertising it’s being used to serve up more relevant ads; in the insurance industry it’s being used to offer fairer premiums.

VortexDNA’s potential implications caught the attention of men’s magazine M2, which featured VortexDNA CEO Branton Kenton-Dau in their July issue. The two-page spread featured an in-depth interview — and a very styley photo of Branton with a Maserati! Click on the image below to view full-size.

These properties of ideas are why I get so excited when I see people whose ideas are in alignment with ours. The more of us in alignment, the bigger our dream becomes. And so I just about fell off my chair when I read Cracking the Green Code from John Marshall Roberts. Roberts assesses why people’s statements about the environment differ from their behaviors — and his assessment describes with exactitude how the Web Genome Project works and why purpose and values can be used to predict behavior. Here’s an excerpt:

Although inherently dynamic and non-linear in nature, a person’s daily behavioral choices are patterned by their core values—those fundamental beliefs, assumptions, and aspirations that they use to make sense of the world around them. A person’s core values act as a gravitational force of consciousness, literally shaping the way the world looks to them, and in turn how they look to the world vis-a-vis their day-to-day behaviors.

To illustrate by way of analogy, imagine spinning a marble around a bathroom sink. At any given point it would be difficult to predict the marble’s exact location, because its movements are somewhat chaotic and random, fluctuating wildly based upon even the most minute textural gradients in the sink surface. In fact, even the most learned physicist would have a terrible time devising an equation that would predict this marble’s exact path. Yet, anyone with an ounce of common sense can easily predict where the marble will end up eventually—right down the drain.

This metaphorical drain shapes our marble’s path in the same way that a person’s core values shape their thoughts and behaviors. Understand a person’s value systems and you will grasp the size, shape and contours of the mental sink around which the myriad “marbles” of their everyday thoughts are endlessly pulled as they strive make sense of the data their five senses send them.

Roberts’ analogy is a wonderful description of how the Web Genome Project works, and why we can personalize search results without knowing anything about your history. We don’t care about your history — what you’ve done or where you’ve been. We care about the sink — what shapes you?

So how do we get an understanding of the sink? We emulate physicists and doctors.

Physicists often work by inference: the only way we know about black holes, for example, is by observing the behavior of matter near them. Doctors do the same thing: we search for antibodies to tell us whether someone has a disease instead of searching for the disease itself.

So too with the Web Genome Project. We all have a numeric profile, and we’ve mapped a certain number of links with their own profiles. The numbers are sticky in both directions: as you click on a link, its number gets integrated into yours and vice versa. No retention of clickstream, no way to know where you’ve been, just the image of the sink that guides who you are.

Thank you, John Marshall Roberts! Thank you, Web Genome Project participants! Together, we are creating the topography of our online universe.

It’s a brave new world.

Gaining acceptance into the Mozilla public directory is a gratifying stamp of credibility for the Web Genome Project and our movement to create a virtual topography of the web.

We’re hugely grateful to you: for downloading the add-on, for writing a review of it on Mozilla, and for being a part of the Web Genome Project. Tell your friends and help us get to 10,000,000 links on the WGP!

If you’re like most Americans, it was roughly four and a half years ago at the Democratic National Convention. I refer you now to one line in particular of that historic speech:

“We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States.”

There is a reason the confidentiality of library records is sacrosanct: it is because the use of them for government intelligence virtually guarantees an imposition on civil liberties.

When we think about going to the library and checking out a John Grisham or a Stephen King, it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss is about. But imagine instead that you’re interested in religion and you check out a Bible or a religious reference book. Now imagine that instead of a Bible, you check out the Koran.

There are millions of versions of this scenario. You love planes and you check out a book to see how jetliners work — now imagine you’re of Middle Eastern descent. You’re fascinated with serial killers. Your friend David recommends Devil in the White City. You’re a student of human behavior and pick up a copy of The Lucifer Effect. Any one of these situations could imply suspicious activity — and, in more than 99% of cases, that suspicion would be dead wrong.

In the book Free Expression and Censorship In America, Herbert Foerstel describes the FBI’s attempts to monitor communist activity through the library system:

At [the University of Maryland, College Park], the agents asked librarians to report on anyone with a “foreign-sounding name or foreign accent” who used the libraries. Such a characterization would fit the majority of students and faculty on most American campuses, yet librarians were asked to monitor reference questions and on-line literature searches, including searches of [the National Technical Information Service], in order to establish the subject interests of these suspicious foreigners. All of this surveillance was conducted despite the fact that the UMCP libraries contained no classified materials, and their collections were presumably open to anyone. When the university complained about the surveillance, an FBI representative claimed that the libraries should feel no obligation to protect the access and privacy rights of noncitizens.

This backstory is why I was glad to see that a court is allowing a lawsuit against Blockbuster to proceed. The lawsuit is backlash from Blockbuster’s participation in Facebook’s ill-conceived Beacon program, which shared user purchase activity across the social network.

Just like libraries, it may seem that the potential harm from this program is minimal. You rent a copy of Wild Things, and the next thing you know your out-of-town girlfriend spots it on your News Feed and you’re having to explain yourself. But just like library books, movies can be an indication of who we are. Unfortunately, they are symptoms that point in a million different directions — symptoms that carry with them a potential for misinterpretation as tempting as a serpent’s apple.

We are eternally trying to find the right balance between freedom and security. Thankfully, books and other media coexist with speech firmly on the ‘freedom’ side of the line. Let’s keep it that way.

What do you think?