WebProNews » danah boyd

Microsoft Talks Google’s Privacy “Fails” at SXSW

Chris Crum — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:17:22 +0000

At the keynote today at SXSW, Microsoft‘s Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google’s privacy "fails" with Buzz. The topic of the keynote was the relationship between privacy and publicity, and she certainly covered much more territory and social media in general, but it was interesting that Google Buzz was essentially the first thing talked about.

A lot of people will love Buzz, and will use it, but that doesn‘t mean Google didn‘t mess up in terms of privacy, she said. She says that the company did nothing wrong technologically (there were multiple ways to opt out), but that Google managed to find the social equivalent of the "uncanny valley".

Google got in trouble by integrating a public facing system inside of one of the most intimate (Gmail), she said, adding that a lot of users believed Google was exposing their private email, even though this was never actually the case.

Google also assumed that people would opt out if they didn‘t want to participate, she said. She said she gives the company the benefit of the doubt, but she can’t help but notice that more companies are starting to think it’s ok to expose people and then back pedal once people flip out.

She said she kept meeting users who thought if they opted out, it would cancel their Gmail account.

With regard to Google’s handling of the situation, Boyd says they "foolishly" told users what they wanted to hear rather than asking them what they wanted to hear.

Make no mistake, the point of the keynote was much larger than pointing out Google’s failure, and it was quite a thought-provoking talk. Still, one can’t help but notice the excessive amount of jabs at Microsoft’s main rival, and emphasis placed on a very young product (the remainder of the speech’s focus was mostly placed upon Facebook and Twitter, with a little bit of Chat Roulette).

Liveblogging: Danah Boyd (Micosoft Research) SXSW Keynote

Chris Crum — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:51:43 +0000

I’m sitting here in the exhibit hall at SXSW getting ready for the opening remarks keynote, which is getting ready to get underway. It will be delivered by Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research

Her SXSW Bio: One of the world’s foremost authorities on social networks, boyd works at Microsoft Research New England and also serves as a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Note: Please forgive he typos that are sure to occur in this liveblog. Also keep in mind that this is paraphrased.

Liveblogging starts:

02: 08 She takes the stage.

2:09 Humbled to be here.

SXSW first and foremost about the people…passionate about what they’re doing. there’s a lot of trouble that goes on but that’s part of the joy.

2:10: Have a good time, but avoid the tequila….

I’m a social media researcher….spend most of my time trying to understand how people use social media in their daily lives. reflecting how to make that material public. blogging for 13 years. believe in being an activist.

What keeps me up at night is how social media transforms society.

Goal: sit back and think about a specfic set of puzzles. All of you are seeing how these tools are shaping society….

Intersection of privacy and publicity.

2:12: privacy isn’t dead. people very much care about it online and off. what privacy means may not be what you think. it’s about control…understanding a social setting. and context. how to behave. understanding what the architecture will let you do….

people feel they don’thave control and they feel violated.

Recent privacy fail: Google Buzz

A lot of people will lvoe buzz and use it, but it doesn’t mean that google didn’t mess up in terms of privacy.

They’re aking a hit.

2:14: Gives background of how buzz works….

2:15: NOthing the buzz team was technologically wrong. there were all sorts of opt outs….shows a slide referencing "F— you Google" …

Deconstruct what acutally happened:

2:19: Talking about engineers looking at "ASL" in chat rooms…there’s something radically different than responding than going into their profile and looking.

Ask users to share with their friends….It’s not the idea of getting that info. it’s the ritual of letting them know how the info will be acquired.

Google managed to find the social equivalent of the uncanny valley…

Personal networks are when you talk to people about what they spend time with

Personal – listing contacts, etc.

Behavioral – networks with people in the same room.

What Google did was collapsed these…

Just because people put material in public doesnt mean it was all meant to come together and be aggregated.

What they did wrong:

1. Google got in trouble by integrating a public facing system inside of one of the most intimate (gmail)….juxtaposing private with public…a lot of users believed google was exposing their private email..this was never technically the case, but it created confusion. people flipped out. google had to spend a lot of time and pr…

2. GOogle assumed that people would opt out if they didnt’ want to participate. gives google benefit of the doubt, but cant help but notice that more companies think its ok to expose tremendously and then back pedal…

Easier for users to flip out rather than to actually go and undo things…

I kept meeting users who thtought if they opted out, it would cancel their gmail account.

You need to ease them in. give them a way to understand…

THey "foolishly" told users what they wanted to hear rather than asking them what they wanted to hear.

Just because people want something publicly accessible doesn’t mean they want it publicized.

Shows slide of Onion article mocking Google

2:23: We see gossip being spread in all sorts of ways. We don’t always navigate privacy with people so well…we hold the architcture around us accountable. The Walls have ears. there is always the possiblity of eavesdroppers.

Talks about being in a cafe…public place, but you expect certain types of people to show up. you expect people from the community but not your high school cheerleading team. When people asses a situation, they develop menal models…they need to know so they know how to "best behave".

online environments are not nearly as stablized…we’re still trying to work through what we can trust in terms of architecture and people.

02:27: Digital architecture doesn’t just have ears. also has a mouth. people aren’t good at managing when the system changes the rules on them.

Recent privacy fail number 2: facebook’s privacy changes in december

Gives a rundown of all of that.

02:28: Asking non techy users: tell me what you privacy settings are? I have yet to find a single person who actually knows. That’s not Good knows. Facebook is known for privacy.

Tells story of teen with abusive father…set up facebook account…found out that her content was made public. is her fear of what might have gone wrong acceptable?

Big difference between publicly available data and publicized data. I worry about this and who will get caught in the crossfire.

PII vs. PEI PII - personally identifiable information vs. personally embarassing information

02:32: When tech comes along and changes rules, it’s a huge fail

Conversations that happen in social media are public by default, private by effort.

What we see with teens is that they’re thiking through this. THey make conscious decisions.

Critical to realize effected by age, life role, etc.

People make material publicly accesssible, but they dont’ want the world to see it. there are poeple that they specifically don’t want to see it.

02:36 "Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy."

People can adjust to change, but you have to think about those who get in trouble during the process.

Compares to paparazzi. Shows slides of britney, lindsay lohan and Princess Diana.

Publicity: Twitter has become a space for celebs, micro-celebs, fans of all sorts.

FB is about communicating with the people you already know, Twitter started out this way, but it’s evolved to follow people who have audiences…

02:39: Issues of intimacy good and bad…cause of trouble for some celebs. Talks about Miley Cyrus quitting Twitter. Quotes from her rap about it.

Twitter isn’t just for celebs and followers. People all over the globe engage with it as specific kind of public space.

two kinds of trending topics: those that start because of external factors, and those that are generated on the site.

02:41: Trending topics also highlight that not all users are who you think they are. Shows Justin Bieber…in trending topics for 18 solid days. For all the conversations of teens not tweeting….all of his followers not all that old.

Lot of racism and classism on Twitter. Shows slides of white people using the N word…

Many have benefited from speaking in public on social media. It’s easy to take things for granted: the right to challenge authority, the right to be heard, seen, the right to go into public without losing my rights, etc. seek pub of own accord…not what everybody gets. Imagine you just left an abusive relationship, but you’re biggest fear is that you ex will find you….how public are you willing to be?

People kicked out of jobs, military…

Your kid’s teacher: how public is she allowed to be online? Religious? Drinking? ALlowed to be a lover and a friend in a public setting? What we see over and over agin is that we expect the teacher to always be the teacher, but that’s a lot to ask from people.

02:46: Public by default: not the great democratizer.

Seeking attention, part of what makes engaging online fun. Quotes Jon Stewart The internet’s like Meixcan food. every sites’ got the same ingredients, just different combinations…talks about chat roulette.

02:49: Why do people engage on this site? What you’ll find is heartwarming and heartbreaking. Many there for entertainment, boredom, find pesonal connections, etc. THere are others hoping they might find a celeb.

It’s an odd combo of privacy and publicity…situated in private spaces (bedrooms, offices), but becomes publc. People are having fun geo-locating people who are participating.

CR may be a fad, but the idea of pub andprivacy getting mixed up is not. New rules will complicate the boundaries…

Tech will continue to make a mess of both.

You need to know that there is now magical formula for understanding privacy and publicity.

If you expose people, you may lose you reputation…

For marketers, its an exciting time of publicility, but just because you can see somebody, doesn’t mean they want to be seen by you. And just because you think you’ve interpreted something, doesn’t mean you’ve done it right.

Wants to see more policy grounded in what’s going on. A lot of numbers can be misinterpreted. What we’re measuring isn’t peoples’ sense of privacy. Wanting privacy isn’t about having something to hide. It’s about wanting control…

There are good reasons to engage in privacy and good ones to engage in publicity.

A lot of people are sharing more publicly to maintain other stuff privately.

Think about people’s intentions and what it means to invade their privacy. Make sure you’re creating the future that you want to live in.

Contextual Ad Exploitation

Aaron Wall — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:09:56 +0000

As an advertiser and a publisher I have ad CTR data spanning hundreds of millions of impressions and about a million ad clicks across a wide array of verticals.

One of my early opinions on contextual ads and search ads was that people are far more likely to click ads if they are desperate, stupid, or ignorant. While I was flamed for my opinion, this opinion has only been confirmed from talking to friends who have much more data than I do, and Dave Morgan from AOL also confirmed it.

Seth pointed to this post by Danah Boyd, which offers a hypothesis on who is clicking ads:

Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively, my hypothesis would be that heavy ad clickers are:

More representative of lower income households than the average user.

Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).

More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.

More likely to be using [social networks] to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

The problem with catering to the lowest common denominator is that the people who are clicking the ads

have less of an ability to buy premium products
are less likely to do follow on marketing for you to promote your products to other
are a small minority of your visitors
are driven away from your site when they click
each day many ignorant users learn more about the web and click less ads
the new users coming on the web replacing those who are learning about it are even poorer and less socially connected than those already on the network

In the next couple years there is going to be a major shift in online ad based business models where many publishers push themselves up the value chain. The trend for profitable publishing, is going to include the following aspects

fewer ads
ads with more information
ads that look more like information
ads tighter integrated into the content
having a semi-porous brand which allows your free content to do your marketing for your paid content
in many case selling ads that include personal endorsement, and ads for white label products or house products (often via subscription)

As more premium publishers shift from ad based models to selling white labeled and house products it is going to get harder to buy ads affordably on the clean parts of the web. And the trend has already started. If you look at some of the most popular investment sites you will see that many of them provide free offers for products that lead you into buying a subscription service.

If you are going to monetize your site from a small minority of your visitors it makes sense to build relationships with them and charge recurring if you can. If your only monetize 5% of your audience would rather have $50 a month from them or 50 cents?

Comments

All The Good Kids Are On Facebook

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:21:17 +0000

Through several months of observation, Danah Boyd found something of a divide between users of social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

All The Good Kids Are On Facebook

There are about 300 million people in the United States, and tossing groups into neat taxonomies of classification doesn’t always do justice to them. We strive to understand the world around us. Organizing groups of people for research always poses an obstacle to that understanding.

Boyd, a Ph.D candidate at Berkeley, wrote of her observations of teens in parts of the US. She gathered her observances on teens and social networking into an essay that reflects the difficulty of dropping someone into a rigidly defined class:

In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around “class” is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like “working class” and “middle class” and “upper class” get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income.

I’m not doing justice to her arguments but it makes complete sense. My friends who are making $14K in cafes are not of the same class as the immigrant janitor in Oakland. Their lives are quite divided. Unfortunately, with this framing, there aren’t really good labels to demarcate the class divisions that do exist.

Demarcate she does, with the Facebook crowd falling into a ‘hegemonic teens’ group, the MySpacers in a ‘subaltern teens’ group. The Facebookies come from relatively stable families, an inference we can make from Boyd’s observation that those families generally emphasize education and going on to college after high school.

The MySpace group encompasses just about everyone else. “These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school,” said Boyd. “Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.”

Reminds me of the line from Rush’s ‘Subdivisions’: “Be cool or be cast out.”

Boyd’s estimation of such divisions comes from talking at schools and finding a split between MySpace and Facebook users, on the lines she came to demarcate later. Then you have those who really don’t fit either group well:

The subaltern teens who are better identified as “outsiders” in a hegemonic community tend to be very aware of Facebook. Their choice to use MySpace instead of Facebook is a rejection of the hegemonic values (and a lack of desire to hang out with the preps and jocks even online).

Playing organized sports and doing programming as a teen aren’t mutually exclusive activities; I know this from personal experience (so Danah, please send me an “outsiders” membership card). I’d like to see Boyd expand upon her work with a more formal study of social networking.

We’ve been told that the Internet is supposed to knock down such divisions, but we’ve seen plenty of examples where class distinctions of all kinds separate people. Maybe we just can’t stop being human enough to be more humane online.