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Social networking phenomenon Facebook has beaten out arch-rival and former market leader MySpace by most measures of popularity, except the one that pays the bills. While Facebook has outpaced MySpace in bringing in members - it has 175 million active users at the latest count, compared with around 130 million for MySpace - it has struggled make money from them. While MySpace is closing in on $1 billion in revenues, Facebook generated less than $300 million in sales last year, reports say. Indeed, Facebook's efforts to drum up revenue have led to it repeatedly becoming the target of some of the biggest online privacy protests on the Web. Its most recent fight earlier this month followed Facebook's attempt to redefine its own rules and assert ownership over anything its members posted on the site. The company has since backed off and is rethinking its policies. Why hasn't Facebook benefited from the vaunted "network effect" that makes such services more valuable the more its adds members and connections between them? After all, Facebook is spreading quickly in nearly 100 languages, while MySpace has focused on the United States and five other markets where Web advertising flourishes. The answer may lie in the origins of the five-year-old site started by then Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg. Its appeal at the outset was that it was a place where users could share tidbits of their personal lives with selected friends and acquaintances. This blurred the distinction between a private space and a public one. MySpace is more explicitly a public place where friends hang out in the equivalent of a cafe or a club and the aim is often to meet new people. Most of all, MySpace is a place to share music with other fans.

Changes relating to different aspects of data management have been highlighted as key trends in the IT industry for 2009 in a report by consultancy Deloitte. The falling price of digital storage has caused an irresponsible approach to file management and IT leaders will need to give an increased focus to these issues, says Deloitte, along with finding ways around the rise in physical storage costs. "There are ways to control the escalation of storage costs, such as de-duplication tools that can free up space by reducing duplicate files," says the report. "Companies can assess the impact of individual applications, especially email - which is estimated to take up 25 per cent of enterprise storage capacity," it says. According to Deloitte's research, businesses will become increasingly aggressive when pursuing disputes related to copyright infringement and digital ownership rights. "If undertaking a swift launch of a product or digital application, companies should ensure that no element could lead to litigation," says the report. Despite pointing out that 2009 will be the break-out year for social networks in the business, Deloitte says that such networks will need to be developed with caution to encourage more productivity and balance control with employees' desire for privacy.

During the past decade, rapid developments in information and communications technology have transformed key social, commercial, and political realities. Within that same time period, working at something less than Internet speed, much of the academic and policy debate arising from these new and emerging technologies has been fragmented. There have been few examples of interdisciplinary dialogue about the importance and impact of anonymity and privacy in a networked society. Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society fills that gap, and examines key questions about anonymity, privacy, and identity in an environment that increasingly automates the collection of personal information and relies upon surveillance to promote private and public sector goals. This book has been informed by the results of a multi-million dollar research project that has brought together a distinguished array of philosophers, ethicists, feminists, cognitive scientists, lawyers, cryptographers, engineers, policy analysts, government policy makers, and privacy experts. Working collaboratively over a four-year period and participating in an iterative process designed to maximize the potential for interdisciplinary discussion and feedback through a series of workshops and peer review, the authors have integrated crucial public policy themes with the most recent research outcomes. The book is available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Canada License by chapter below. Hard copies are available for purchase at Amazon & at Oxford University Press.

Online spying or behavioral targeting?

A question: If you have 347 followers on the Twitter microblogging service, what are the chances that they'll click on the same online ad you clicked on last night? Advertisers are dying to know. Or, say you and a colleague exchange e-mails on a Saturday night. Can managers assume that you have a tight working relationship? Researchers at IBM and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are investigating. Friendships aren't what they used to be. We now have tools, from e-mail to social networks, to keep in touch with people who a decade ago would have drifted into distant memories. Practically every hand we shake and every business card we exchange can lead to an invitation, sometimes within minutes, for a "friendship" on LinkedIn or Facebook. And unless we sever them, these ties could linger for the rest of our lives. What do these relationships say about us and the people in our networks? Companies armed with rich new data and powerful computers are beginning to explore these questions. They're finding that digital friendships speak volumes about us as consumers and workers, and decoding the data can lead to profitable insights. Calculating the value of these relationships has become a defining challenge for businesses and individuals. Marketers are leading the way. They're finding that if our friends buy something, there's a better-than-average chance we'll buy it, too. It's a simple insight but one that could lead to targeted messaging in an age of growing media clutter.

The Obama administration is trying to take the lead on a number of technology issues, including cybersecurity, network neutrality and broadband availability. But one prominent omission is privacy, a topic about which the administration has said very little. At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington on Tuesday, one administration official did address privacy somewhat. Susan Crawford, a member of the National Economic Council looking after science and technology policy, listed some of the efforts by the Federal Trade Commission to press for new rules for behavioral advertising. But she didn't mention that all of those rules were written under the Bush administration. Peter Swire, an Ohio State law professor who served on the Obama transition team, offered one reason it might be difficult for the administration to find its voice on privacy. There is a split, he told the conference, between the typical view of privacy among technology experts and the emerging view of people brought up in the social networking, Web 2.0 world.

Diplomats and civil servants are to be warned about the danger of putting details of their family and career on social networking websites. The advice comes after the wife of Sir John Sawers, the next head of MI6, put family details on Facebook - which is accessible to millions of internet users. Lady Sawers disclosed details such as the location of the London flat used by the couple and the whereabouts of their three children and of Sir John's parents. She put no privacy protection on her account, allowing any of Facebook's 200 million users in the open-access London network to see the entries. Lady Sawers' half-brother, Hugo Haig-Thomas, a former diplomat, was among those featured in family photographs on Facebook. Mr HaigThomas was an associate and researcher for David Irving, the controversial historian who was jailed in Austria in 2006 after pleading guilty to Holocaust denial. Patrick Mercer, the Conservative chairman of the Commons counter-terrorism sub-committee, said that the entries were a serious error and potentially damaging.

Yesterday, CBC radio's morning show, the current, featured Lessons From The Identity Trail co-author, Ian Kerr, who discussed the book and a number of contemporary challenges that privacy faces in light of emerging technologies with guest host, Nancy Wilson. Below is the the text of Nancy Wilson's introduction and a link to the podcast of the full length interview in segment #3 of the show. To some people the Internet is the world's biggest commons ... a global public square. For others, it's a realm of shadowy, anonymous figures hiding behind online aliases. But anonymity is becoming less and less a feature of life online. We aired a clip with one perspective on that trend, posted last May on the website, Mobuzz.tv. Taking responsibility for your actions on line may be just one way you relinquish privacy. Every day, millions of Canadians hop on the Internet to check their e-mail, chat with their friends on social networking sites, book a vacation or buy a gift. And each time they click on a purchase or post a picture, they give up a little bit of their privacy. With this explosion of information technology - there are those who warn that our anonymity and our right to privacy is in jeopardy. That's the premise of a new book called On The Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society. Academics, governments and private corporations around the world contributed to the book, which examines how technology is changing the nature of our private lives, and what it means to be "anonymous."

Update on Feb. 18, 8:33 a.m.: Facebook is backing off changes to its terms of service, informing users on their official blog that they will remain intact. "Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes in the blog. "Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised." To learn more, read our original post below. Facebook is having trouble dousing the flames in a firestorm over its trustworthiness. A recent change in its terms of use -- the legalese tacked onto the bottom of most websites -- has sparked concerns that the social networking giant plans to own all users' information forever. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed in a blog post Monday that "on Facebook people own and control their information." But privacy advocates still aren't satisfied. "I think in simple terms it's a tug of war over user data," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington. "People put information on a Facebook page to share with friends. But it's pretty much with the understanding that they're deciding what to post and who has access to it. Facebook, like any other company, is trying to obtain maximum commercial value from its users."

GovLoop (http://govloop.com), an online community created for and by government employees, announced today it has signed up its 10,000th member less than a year after launching. Dubbed by some as a "Facebook for Feds," GovLoop brings together government employees from the U.S. and other nations to discuss ideas, share best practices and create a community dedicated to the betterment of government. A revolution is happening in government as the result of a new generation of government employees, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, and the Obama administration's focus on transparency, participation, and collaboration. This revolution is often called "Government 2.0" and GovLoop is at the center of this movement. The social network was developed by Steve Ressler, a 28-year old federal employee from Tampa, Fla. who is also a co-founder of Young Government Leaders (http://youngovernmentleaders.org). Fed up with the silos that existed across government agencies, including artificial barriers between levels of government, rank and age, Ressler believed there had to be a better way to share information, so he launched GovLoop.com in June 2008.

Everywhere you look (even here at Ars), there are articles about people making poor decisions about what kinds of info and how much to share on sites like Facebook. The Internet is no longer a place where you can hide out easily-friends, family, and employers are all lurking, reading your embarrassing status updates and checking up on those drunken pictures from last week. And that's just the beginning-the world of social networking is a feeding ground for identity thieves and stalkers, too. But it doesn't have to be that way. Many users are aware that Facebook has numerous privacy controls, for example, but even the most experienced Facebook users often don't know just how much they can control who sees what. For instance, did you know that you can specify...

Tax deadbeats are finding someone actually reads their MySpace and Facebook postings: the taxman. State revenue agents have begun nabbing scofflaws by mining information posted on social-networking Web sites, from relocation announcements to professional profiles to financial boasts. In Minnesota, authorities were able to levy back taxes on the wages of a long-sought tax evader after he announced on MySpace that he would be returning to his home town to work as a real-estate broker and gave his employer's name. The state collected several thousand dollars, the full amount due.

With Twitter firmly established as the "conversation place to be," marketers are beginning to look for where they fit in. And that means tools. For the uninitiated, Twitter is a service that lets individuals exchange 140-character messages-via computer or mobile device-with groups of "followers." The result is a fast-and-loose, multidimensional conversation that falls somewhere in between blogging and text messaging, happening in real time between millions of users around the world. Luckily, the Web interface for Twitter.com is just the start of many ways to interact with and glean intelligence from Twitter conversations. There is big potential value for tapping into the Twitter-stream for insights into what customers are saying about your company's brand and its market. "Millions are leaning on Twitter pretty hard as a way to network and communicate with contacts new and old," said John Jatsch, a social marketing expert and operator of Duct Tape Marketing. He added that marketers have many options for how to use Twitter, including connecting with customers, monitoring conversations and testing new ideas. To use Twitter to its fullest, b-to-b marketers should consider using the following handful of tools and services: ??Twitter clients. It doesn't take long for most Twitter users to move beyond using Twitter.com to post and monitor their posts or "tweets." There are much more powerful tools at your disposal for reading, filtering, searching and posting to Twitter.com. The list of Twitter clients includes popular Mac client Twitterific; Adobe Air-based clients such as Twhirl, Tweetr and Spaz; Firefox add-ons like Twitterfox and TwitBin; and software that lets you track multiple social engines-such as Facebook, FriendFeed and even instant messaging as well as Twitter-like Digsby and AlertThingy. A new client receiving a lot of buzz is TweetDeck, which features a huge but customizable user interface that makes it easier to track posts, re

There is no simple technology solution to protect children from bullying, pornography, sexual predation and other online threats, a new study says. The highly anticipated report -- results of a year-long study ordered by 49 state attorneys general -- found that "a combination of technologies, in concert with parental oversight, education, social services, law enforcement, and sound policies by social-network sites and service providers, may assist in addressing specific problems that minors face online," according to a draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The report also found that the risks that minors face on the Web -- notably bullying and harassment by peers -- aren't very different from those they face in the real world. The report is scheduled to be issued Wednesday by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, led by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Task-force members included representatives of several top Internet and security companies, including News Corp.'s MySpace, Google Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Facebook Inc. (News Corp. also publishes the Journal.) The 278-page report is a boon for the Web companies, which have long argued that technology isn't the sole solution to the dangers kids face online. It is a disappointment for those in favor of stricter technological controls, such as age-verification and filtering tools.

Privacy is Dead. Long Live Privacy? at the 2007 Battle of Ideas conference hosted by the Institute of Ideas.New technology seems to have changed the meaning of privacy, affording individuals the possibility of sharing details of their hitherto private lives in unprecedented ways, from personal blogs to picture sharing and even 'social bookmarking'. For many of us, divulging intimate details of our private lives via social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook has become the norm. But information and communication technologies have also facilitated surveillance and data gathering by government and big businesses. While in some contexts we seem so ready to give up our privacy, in others we seem increasingly anxious to protect it.To what extent are new technologies responsible for the death of privacy? Are privacy concerns simply technophobic, or are we right to worry about a loss of control over personal information? Have new technologies and our enthusiastic adoption of them actually transformed our notions of public and private, and blown apart the wall dividing the two? Why do we worry about Tesco monitoring what we buy, when, according to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy: 'You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it'? - IoI

"You probably don't analyze the chatter or quality of your social media connections, but creditors may be doing just that. In their quest to identify creditworthy customers, some are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal in the virtual stratosphere. Before calling the privacy police, though, understand how it's really being used."

The social media outlets you use may affect credit offers!

Facebook's developer platform has been used for a zillion marketing campaigns so far, but this one is actually dead-on hilarious. Fast-food chain Burger King has created "Whopper Sacrifice," a Facebook app that will give you a coupon for a free hamburger if you delete 10 people from your friends list. Burger King has put out some interesting campaigns as of late ("Whopper Virgin," "Subservient Chicken"), but this one piques our interest because of how gleefully it pokes fun at our social-networking obsessions. "Now is the time to put your fair-weather Web friendships to the test," the Whopper Sacrifice site explains. "Install Whopper Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we'll reward you with a free flame-broiled Whopper when you sacrifice ten of your friends. The funniest part: The "sacrifices" show up in your activity feed. So it'll say, for example, "Caroline sacrificed Josh Lowensohn for a free Whopper." Unfortunately, you can't delete your whole friends list and eat free (however unhealthily) for a week. The promotion is limited to one coupon per Facebook account. My Facebook friends had better appreciate the fact that I made a New Year's resolution to cut out red meat. Hint, hint.

The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy. According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being "to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation." Behavioral advertising, in particular, has come under fire by privacy groups. Earlier this month, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and other related organizations called for stronger rules limiting what kinds of personal information are collected by marketers and how long they can hold on them.

Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. Using peer-to-peer applications, which computer users download to share files, most commonly music and movies, M. Eric Johnson, director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., was able to access electronic medical records on computers that had the peer-to-peer programs stored on their hard drives. The medical files contained detailed personal data on physical and mental diagnoses, which a hacker could use to not only embarrass a patient but also to commit medical fraud. One of the largest stashes of medical data Johnson discovered during two weeks of research he conducted in January was a database containing two spreadsheets from a hospital he declined to identify. The files contained records on 20,000 patients, which included names, Social Security numbers, insurance carriers and codes for diagnoses. The codes identified by name four patients infected with AIDS, the mental illnesses that 201 others were diagnosed as having and cancer findings for 326 patients. Data also included links to four major hospitals and 355 insurance carriers that provided health coverage to 4,029 employers and 266 doctors.

"The Federal Trade Commission will host a series of day-long public roundtable discussions to explore the privacy challenges posed by the vast array of 21st century technology and business practices that collect and use consumer data. Such practices include social networking, cloud computing, online behavioral advertising, mobile marketing, and the collection and use of information by retailers, data brokers, third-party applications, and other diverse businesses. The goal of the roundtables is to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation."

"A privacy watchdog's criticisms of Facebook appear to have captured the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. In a letter dated Jan. 14, David Vladeck, head of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, told the Electronic Privacy Information Center that its complaint about recent privacy changes at Facebook "raises issues of particular interest for us at this time." Vladeck added that he has asked an official to arrange a followup meeting with EPIC, but also said he can't currently confirm or deny whether the FTC has opened an investigation. FTC investigations are not public until the agency either issues a complaint or closes the matter. The FTC's consumer protection chief also said in his letter to EPIC that the commission plans to focus on privacy issues raised by social networks at the next roundtable, scheduled to be held in Berkeley, Calif. on Jan. 28. "

FTC may investigate privacy issues on FaceBook? Equal bang for the buck by identifying and educating users who post way too much personal information.