That said, Cohen got it right this week. In an entry titled “A Facebook Teaching Moment”, the scenarior is about a teacher who has been “friended” by a number of her students Facebook, and subsequently gains access to tibits about their lives, including “the inevitable under-age drinking and drug use and occasional school-related mischief like cheating on tests or plagiarizing assignments.” The question posed to Cohen is whether the teacher has an obligation to report any of these activities to the school, the police or the parents of the students.

Cohen says no, the teacher should engage with the students and turn this into a teaching momement about privacy and online social networks. Importantly, Cohen recognizes that just because the students “friended” the teacher, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any expectations of privacy within the social networking context:

Strictly speaking, when these students gave her access to their Facebook pages, they waived their right to privacy. But that’s not how many kids see it. To them, Facebook and the like occupy some weird twilight zone between public and private information, rather like a diary left on the kitchen table. That a photo of drunken antics might thwart a chance at a job or a scholarship is not something all kids seriously consider. This teacher can get them to think about that.

Well done, Ethicist.

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Today, the research was published: “Carnegie Mellon Researchers Find Social Security Numbers
Can Be Predicted from Publicly Available Information”

From the release:

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have shown that public information readily gleaned from governmental sources, commercial data bases, or online social networks can be used to routinely predict most — and sometimes all — of an individual’s nine-digit Social Security number.

Project lead Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon’s H. John Heinz III College, and Ralph Gross, a post-doctoral researcher at the Heinz College, have found that an individual’s date and state of birth are sufficient to guess his or her Social Security number with great accuracy. The study findings will appear this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and will be presented on July 29 at the BlackHat 2009 information security conference in Las Vegas. Additional information about the study and some of the issues it raises is available at http://www.ssnstudy.org.

The predictability of Social Security numbers is an unexpected consequence of seemingly unrelated policies and technological developments that, in combination, make Social Security numbers obsolete for authentication purposes, according to Acquisti and Gross. Because many businesses use Social Security numbers as passwords or for other forms of authentication — a use not anticipated when Social Security was devised in the 1930s — the predictability of the numbers increases the risk of identity theft. ID theft cost Americans almost $50 billion in 2007 alone. The Social Security Administration could mitigate this vulnerability by assigning numbers to people based on a randomized scheme, but ultimately an alternative means of authenticating identities must be adopted, the authors conclude.

…

Acquisti and Gross tested their prediction method using records from the Death Master File of people who died between 1973 and 2003. They could identify in a single attempt the first five digits for 44 percent of deceased individuals who were born after 1988 and for 7 percent of those born between 1973 and 1988. They were able to identify all nine digits for 8.5 percent of those individuals born after 1988 in fewer than 1,000 attempts. Their accuracy was considerably higher for smaller states and recent years of birth: for instance, they needed 10 or fewer attempts to predict all nine digits for one out of 20 SSNs issued in Delaware in 1996. Sensitive details of the prediction strategy were omitted from the article.

“If you can successfully identify all nine digits of an SSN in fewer than 10, 100 or even 1,000 attempts, that Social Security number is no more secure than a three-digit PIN,” the authors noted.

When the researchers tested their method using birth dates and hometowns that students had self-reported on popular social networking sites, the results were almost as good despite the inaccuracies typical of social network data. Enrollment records were used to confirm the accuracy of the predictions, though the researchers did not receive confirmation of any individual Social Security number, but only aggregate measures of accuracy.

The full paper can be downloaded here, and the researchers have released a helpful FAQ about the nature of the work. The New York Times has a nice story on the research, and Rebecca Herold has posted a list of multiple actions that need to be taken to address this inherent flaw in our reliance on SSNs.

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Overall, the conference was a success. Corfu was delightful, and the presentations sparked good conversations. Following are some highlights and reactions:

• Prof Terry Bynum was awarded the Weizenbaum Award and delivered the opening day’s keynote, “Philosophy and the Information Revolution”, which provided a brilliant summary of phlisophies of information from Norbert Wiener to Luciano Floridi.
• Stuart Ferguson, Clare Thornley, and John Weckert discussed their research on “RFIDs and Surveillance: New Ethical Dilemmas for Libraries”, which morphed into a nice conversation about the intersections between privacy, intellectual freedom, library 2.0, and social media.
• Don Gotterbarn and Jim Moor presented “Virtual Decisions: Just Consequentialism, Video Game Ethics, and Rapid Ethical Analysis”, prompting thoughts about how video games might promote (intentionally or not) ethical decision making, raning from egoism to altruism to social responsibility, etc.
• Stephanie Patridge delivered an excellent paper, “Default Social Meaning and Video Game Imagery: An Ethics of Video Game Play”, providing a broad analysis & critique of game imagery, while revealing the difficulty of bringing “morality into video game worlds” given the “problem of fictionality”.
• Göran Collste’s paper, “The Ethics of Ambient Computing for Personal Health Monitoring”, focused on issues of technological paternalism, the “medicalization of personal identity”, and the emerging “reign of technology” in personal health care management.
• Fran Grodzinsky and Herman Tavani discussed their (much-anticipated) paper, “Can the “Contextual Integrity” model of privacy be applied to personal blogs in the blogosphere?” While it was great seeing an application of contextual integrity to a concrete example, I was left a bit unsatisfied regarding their treatment of blogs (as were others).
• Ken Himma presented “A General Moral Defense of Intellectual Rights”, which provided a nice overview of the philosophical dimensions of the ongoing intellectual property debate. I don’t agree, however, with Himma’s assertion that users have a less morally-legitimate interest in protected content desired for entertainment than content deemed necessary for survival (ie, entertainment provides me a release valve, which can be essential to my well-being, productivity, etc).
• Solon Barocas and Helen Nissenbaum presented their work on “What’s wrong with with Behavioral advertising?”, aruging that behavioral targeting is not inherently unethical, but the particular approach is flawed in its approach: by inherently straddline multiple contexts online, it fails to respect context-dependent norms of information flows.
• Carson Reynolds discussed an interesting paper, “Machine Self-Sacrifice”, which argues against Floridi’s belief that informational objects have intrinsic moral worth (and thus should be preserved), insisting instead that some systems only function properly if the information they contain is destroyed (land mines, ant colonies, etc).
• John Sullins and John Aycock led an excellent panel discussion on “Malware Ethics: The Beneficial Use of Forbidden Knowledge”, focusing on the ethics and challenges of teaching malware to computer science students.
  
• SOIS grad students, and INSEIT fellows, Erin Hvizdak and Tony Hoffmann, presented their thoughts on “Issues of Research Ethics in Computer Science” and “New Directions for Information Justice”, respectively.
• Deborah Johnson (in a debate with Jim Moor) argued that “A New Account of Computer Ethics is Needed”, mostly by giving the computer ethics discipline a (needed) lesson in STS and SCOT. Moor responded by stating what Johnson was looking for is already in the “standard view” of computer ethics…
  
• Finally, Berkman Executive Director Urs Gasser delivered the closing keynote, “Past, Present, and Future of Digital Copyright Law”, providing a helpful review of the current state if IP, suggesting how “copynorms” — social norms on how we share content — developed long before the Internet, and that we must breakdown “historical technonormative identities” of producers/consumers and recast them as collaborations.
  

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Recall that last fall, a group of researchers affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University released a dataset of Facebook profile information from an entire cohort (the class of 2009) of college students from “an anonymous, northeastern American university.” While the researchers took good faith steps to preserve the anonymity of the source of the data (and, presumably, the privacy of the subjects), I quickly narrowed it down to 7 possible universities, and then with only a little more effort, identified the source (with some confidence) as Harvard College. All this without ever even downloading or looking at the actual data.

The researchers have since pulled the data out of circulation, and plan to make it available again this month, presumably with some of the anonymity and privacy concerns addressed.

The draft paper I am presenting, “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook, retells the circumstances around the T3 project and my partial re-identification of the dataset. It also describes some of the good faith efforts made by the T3 researchers to try to ensure the anonymity of the data, but exposes the limitations and errors in their procedures. Finally, it highlights the broader challenges for engaging in research on/in social networking sites that this case brings to light. These include:

• the nature of consent in online research
• identifying and respecting expectations of privacy on social network sites
• developing sufficient strategies for data anonymization prior to the public release of potentially personally-identifiable data
• measuring the relative expertise of institutional review boards when confronted with innovative research projects based on data gleaned from social media

Future versions of the paper will attempt to provide some guidelines in this regard. In the meantime, I welcome any comments on this draft. E-mail me if you would like to receive a copy.

The PDF of my CEPE presentation is here.

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Google has conceded, and will now erase identifiable raw data depicting people, property, or cars upon request.

This is a first, and it is significant, but it is an exception only for Germany.

Rather than taking a broader value-centered approach to designing its systems, Google continues to base their decisions based (primarily) on local laws. The U.S. lacks laws guaranteeing individuals “privacy in public,” so Google launches street view with minimal (and poorly-executed) ability to protect one’s privacy. Canada, however, does have such laws, so Google decided to blur faces there (but only applies that engineering solution to Canada). Now, Germany wants the source data purged, so Google will only provide this privacy-protecting measure to that local authority.

A broader values-centered approach would (learning from the Canadian and EU legal environment) recognize that protecting one’s privacy in public might indeed be a fundamental right, and perhaps is something that must be designed into such a potentially privacy-invasive tool as Street View.

I’ve informally chatted with Google folks about these issues, and I applaud that they do have law/policy folks on every product team. But too often, when asked about something like “why didn’t you blur the faces in the U.S. version”, the answer is “the law doesn’t require it”. Such a strict legal approach to designing (or not) ethics into products is extremely shortsighted.

Do we need to start calling for Chief Ethical Officers in our corporations?

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Here’s the (abridged) history and escalation [Updated on 6/19/09 to include ABC News coverage]:

02/15/2009: Ginny Maziarka, who blogs at WISSUP, files a formal complaint with the West Bend Community Memorial Library regarding the presence of LGBTQ-themed books in the library’s young adult section. In her words: “Children as young as 11 years old have free access to propaganda-type reading material (I hesitate to call it literature, thanks) that glamorizes and encourages homosexual activity.” Maziarka also shows frustration that the library does not appear to provide “information about EX-GAYS, people who have left that lifestyle, and/or the TRUTH behind homosexuality and its origin.”

02/26/2009: Maziarka meets with various library officials, requesting that (1) the library attain “balance” by including “faith-based and ex-”gay” books that oppose a pro-homosexual ideology” within the young adult section; and (2) removal of any book in children’s and young adult section that contains “perverse and pornographic language”. Both requests were denied.

03/03/2009: The scheduled Library Board meeting to discuss Maziarka’s complaint is postponed due to the crowd of over 300 people exceeding the fire code (the meeting was already relocated to a larger room in anticipation of the turnout).

03/20/2009: Maziarka receives a communication from library director explaining that since (in his and the city attorney’s opinion) the nature of her complaint has changed, the re-scheduled Library Board meeting to discuss the original complaint has been canceled. Maziarka is urged to submit a new, updated, complaint to re-start the process. Maziarka responds by stating the library’s “withdrawal of our complaint is in gross error” and wishes to move forward.

03/26/2009: Maziarka issues a petition for a “child-safe, family-friendly library.” The petition requests the library board take a roll call vote on the following five issues:

1. Reclassification of Youth-Targeted Pornographic Books into the adult section of the library.
2. Visual identification of explicit material with a parental advisory.
3. Restrict Library-generated Online Sexual Content.
4. Balanced Literature on Controversial Issues including homosexuality.
5. Children’s Internet Protection – require the libraries to implement technology protection to protect minors from internet porn on public computers in accordance with the Children’s Internet Protection Act.

03/26/2009: Maziarka holds a “town meeting” about the library controversy. About 150 attended, reflecting both sides of the issue; no library officials were present. The controversy gains additional media attention.

04/14/2009: UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies issues a statement of support for the West Bend Library, hailing their “support of the principle of intellectual freedom in the face of pressure to abandon their professional and communal commitments.”

04/18/2009: Maziarka e-mails local media outlets, conservative commentators and the town of West Bend clerk, asking they help stop scheduled appointments to the Library Board until the controversy is settled.

04/22/2009: The West Bend City Council refuses to re-appoint 4 sitting library board members over their handling of the controversy, sparking statements of condemnation from the American Library Association and a collection of free speech organizations (PDF). Additional national press coverage emerges.

05/02/2009: The Milwaukee branch of the so-called “Christian Civil Liberties Union” filed a legal claim against the the city of West Bend, Mayor Kristine Deiss, the West Bend Library Board and Library Director Michael Tyree, arguing that the young adult book Baby Be-Bop is offensive, and that the book’s “words can permeate violence, and puts one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.” The group demands $120,000, Deiss’ resignation and the book be removed and publicly burned or destroyed. Maziarka distances herself from this group, as others shoot it down as ridiculous.

05/18/2009: The West Bend City Council affirms its original refusal to re-appoint 4 sitting library board members.

06/02/2009: The Library Board (including the 4 members who were denied re-appointment, but not yet replaced)  held a public meeting to discuss the issues presented in Maziarka’s petition. After listening to both sides for over two hours, the library board unanimously concluded that its existing policies regarding these texts were sufficient. Maziarka declares the library “XXX-rated” and unsafe for children.

06/03/2009: In its report of the library board meeting, the ALA notes that members of the “Christian Civil Liberties Union” were present and distributed copies of their complaint to attendees, complete with their call to burn the library’s copy of Baby Be-Bop. This is picked up (and ridiculed) by numerous bloggers and online news agencies, most notably Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, the Drudge Retort, the Times Online and the Guardian.

06/16/2009: Enter Gawker. The immensely popular and snarky news and gossip blog posts about the blog wars that have emerged around the library controversy. The focus is on Maziarka’s WISSUP and the anonymously-written Sleepless in West Bend, described by Gawker as “this crazy book-burning lady and her angry liberal enemy.” The comments are less friendly.

06/19/2009: ABC News publishes a somewhat lengthy story on the controversy, focusing mostly on the CCLU claim, attracting a long string of comments.

So, we went from a single complaint about GLBTQ books, to a canceled board meeting, a larger petition about “sexually explicit” books, a call for book burning, condemnation from various information professionals, ousted library board members, the upholding of library policies, and ridicule in Daily Kos and Gawker.

It is hard to imagine how this will escalate further, but it inevitably will….

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The open letter is signed by 38 researchers and academics in the fields of computer science, information security and privacy law — myself included. The letter was spearheaded by Christopher Soghoian, a computer researcher, programmer and privacy activist, and it has already received some press coverage at Wired and NY Times.

From the letter’s executive summary:

This six page letter to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, is signed by 38 researchers and academics in the fields of computer science, information security and privacy law. Together, they ask Google to honor the important privacy promises it has made to its customers and protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption technology (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs, and Calendar.

Google already uses industry-standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) encryption  technology to protect customers’ login information. However, encryption is not enabled by default to protect other information transmitted by users of Google Mail, Docs or Calendar. As a result, Google customers who compose email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and calendar plans from a public connection (such as open wireless networks in coffee shops, libraries, and schools) face a very real risk of data theft and snooping, even by unsophisticated attackers. Tools to steal information are widely available on the Internet.

Google supports HTTPS encryption for the entire Gmail, Docs or Calendar session.  However, this is disabled by default, and the configuration option controlling this security mechanism is not easy to discover. Few users know the risks they face when logging into Google’s Web applications from an unsecured network, and Google’s existing efforts are little help.

Support for HTTPS is built into every Web browser and is widely used in the finance and health industries to protect consumers’ sensitive information. Google even uses HTTPS encryption, enabled by default, to protect customers using Google Voice, Health, AdSense and Adwords. Google should now extend this degree of protection to users of Gmail, Docs and Calendar.

Rather than forcing its customers to “opt-in” to adequate security, Google should make security and privacy the default.

HTTPS is commonly used by banks and e-commerce websites to protect sensitive user information in transit; it ensures that anyone “snooping” on the network cannot see your password or credit card information “in the clear”. While Google does use HTTPS when you log into your GMail or Docs account, thereby protecting your password, the remainder of your activities on those applications occur unencrypted, leaving everything you do and type susceptible to snooping. Google does allow users to turn on HTTPS for all of their activities, but the default setting is for less-secure processing, and Google does a poor job of promoting and explaining the benfits of using a secured connetion (sound familiar?).

The letter asks the following of Google:

[R]ather than forcing users to “opt-in” to adequate security, we strongly urge you to make security and privacy the default setting, and allow informed users to “opt-out” of the encryption if they feel it is an unnecessary burden.

If Google insists on not enabling these encryption-based protective measures by default, the company should at least make the consequences of this decision more prominent, so that users make a fully informed choice. Few users know the risks they face when logging into Google’s Web applications from an unsecured network, and Google’s existing efforts are little help. We suggest that, at minimum, Google do four things:

1. Place a link or checkbox on the login page for Gmail, Docs, and Calendar, that causes that session to be conducted entirely over HTTPS. This is similar to the “remember me on this computer” option already listed on various Google login pages. As an example, the text next to the option could read “protect all my data using encryption.”
2. Increase visibility of the “always use https” configuration option in Gmail. It should not be the last option on the Settings page, and users should not need to scroll down to see it.
3. Rename this option to increase clarity, and expand the accompanying description so that its importance and functionality is understandable to the average user.
4. Make the “always use https” option universal, so that it applies to all of Google’s products.  Gmail users who set this option should have their Docs and Calendar sessions equally protected.

Google has responded, acknowledging these concerns, but stating they “want to more completely understand the impact on people’s experience” before making HTTPS the default. Google seems most concerned about HTTPS’s impact on speed, asking rhetorically “Does it load fast enough? Is it responsive enough?”. These are loaded questions, since users typically don’t know what “enough” is, especially when they aren’t fully told the security risks of not using HTTPS.

We further address this issue of latency in the letter:

Once a user has loaded Google Mail or Docs in their browser, performance does not depend upon a low latency Internet connection. The user’s interactions with Google’s applications typically do not depend on an immediate response from Google’s servers. This separation of the application from the Internet connection enables Google to offer ‘offline’ versions of its most popular Web applications.

Even when low latency is important, financial firms such as Bank of America and American Express have demonstrated how to provide users with a pleasant, low-latency browsing experience, while still implementing strong encryption by default. Likewise, Adobe’s cloud-based Photoshop Express lets users interactively edit images via a Web application that is 100% encrypted by default.

Other Google applications demonstrate that security need not come at the cost of performance. Google’s Health service enables users to browse through and manage their private health information online. Google’s Voice service lets customers initiate VOIP phone calls, send text messages, and manage voicemail inboxes.  However, unlike with its Gmail, Docs, and Calendar products, Google only provides access to Health and Voice via HTTPS encrypted communications sessions, recognizing the highly sensitive health and call record information users entrust to Google.  Likewise, Google’s AdWords and AdSense products, which are the backbone of Google’s advertising business, can only be managed by customers using a secure HTTPS connection.

Google’s engineers have created a low-latency, enjoyable experience for users of Health, Voice, AdWords and AdSense – we are confident that these same skilled engineers can make any necessary tweaks to make Gmail, Docs, and Calendar work equally well in order to enable encryption by default.

I hope Google does the right thing and put the privacy and security of its customers first by making the changes described in this important letter.

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Here’s my quick summary, but I encourage you to read the full text:

0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession.

1. Web 2.0 applications and platforms remain ‘new’ but show a tendency to get lost inside the boring, stressful and uncertain working life of the connected billions.

2. Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. …They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

3. Social networking sites are as much fashion victims as everything else. They come and go. Their migration across space signals the enculturisation of software.

4. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

5. What Web 2.0 lacks is the technique of antagonistic linkage. Instead, we are confronted with the Tyranny of Positive Energy

6. …you will be required to do never-ending maintenance work to manage all your data feeds and updates. That’ll subtract a bit of time from your daily routine.

7. The Network will not be Revolutionized.

8. Web 2.0 is not for free. ‘Free as in free beer’ is not like ‘free as in freedom’. Open does not equal free. These days ‘free’ is just another word for service economies. …As users and prosumers we are limited by our capacity as data producers. Our tastes and preferences, our opinions and movements are the market price to pay.

9. Soon the Web 2.0 business model will be obsolete. It is based on the endless growth principle, pushed by the endless growth of consumerism.

10 We need to promote peer-education that shifts the default culture of auto-formation to the nihilist pleasure of hacking the system. …One strategy could be to make the one (’real’) identity more complex and, where possible, contradictory. But whatever your identify might be, it will always be harvested. If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.

I find #8 and #10 most prescient, especially in light of my emerging Laws of Social Networking…

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Social networks’ ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users sharing information about themselves, their lives, and their interests. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg confirms this point when he notes that “as long as the stream of information is constantly increasing, and as long as we’re doing our job… of pushing that forward, I think that’s….the best strategy for [Facebook]“. In short, the best strategy for social networks is to increase personal information flows online, or, again in Zuckerberg’s words, to get “people through this really big hurdle of getting people to want to put up their full name, a real picture, mobile phone number…and connections to real people” online.

Consequently, creating and promoting robust, easy-to-use privacy settings to allow users to control and possibly restrict the information they share would generally be counter to a social networking service’s strategic interest. This is my Second Law of Social Networking. Again, consider Zuckerberg’s response to an interviewer’s suggestion that Facebook’s privacy controls are unknown or mis-used by uses: Zuckerberg seemingly laughs it off by simply replying “well, the privacy controls are there.” As if just having them there is good enough….

Still, we are seeing increased pressure for social networks to improve their privacy practices, as well as the flexibility they provide users to control the flow of their personal information. While their inability to design for privacy from the start remains problematic, and the complex privacy settings often need supplemental materials to help make them useful for users, Facebook does have some of the most robust privacy filters out there (at least in terms of users ability to control what other users see).

This apparent contradiction is studied in an important new paper titled “The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks” by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch.The University of Cambridge researchers conducted a thorough analysis of the privacy practices and policies in online social networks, revealing some interesting results regarding how social networking sites differentiate (or not) themselves in the “privacy marketplace.” (Technology Review has a good summary of the research, and some of its implications, including quotes from myself).

They summarize their results as follows (emphasis added):

Our contribution is threefold. First, we report the results of a thorough analysis of the privacy supply in the social networking market (Section 4). Our data supports some common assumptions, such as a generally low quality of privacy policies, usability problems, and poor security practices. It also provides some surprises such as promotion of photo-sharing being far more common than game-playing, and a huge diversity of privacy controls available in different networks which is not effectively conveyed to users.

Second, we aggregate our data into overall privacy and functionality scores for each site, and use these to find which general factors may influence a site’s privacy practices (Section 5). Again, we find interesting results, such as niche sites offering significantly less sophisticated privacy controls than general-purpose sites, positive correlations between privacy and the age, size, and popularity of a site. Privacy and functionality aren’t strong correlated, but sites that promote on privacy are often found having less favourable privacy practices. We also find evidence that sites with better privacy are growing ahead of the market, while those that mention their privacy are falling behind.

Finally, we propose a novel economic model to explain the observed under-supply and under-promotion of privacy as a rational choice by the competing social networking providers. Our model assumes the existence of consumers with varying degrees of privacy concern. We conjecture that websites seek to maximise their desirability to both populations by not raising privacy concerns for the majority of users, while minimising criticism from the privacy-sensitive.

Their final point is worth special consideration: According to the authors, social networking sites might build robust privacy settings to appease privacy advocates, but they don’t promote them and/or make them difficult to use so the majority of users don’t bother to change their default settings, thereby keeping the open flows of personal information undisturbed.

This is my Third Law of Social Networking: Provide privacy, but make it hard. Social networking providers will never admit to this, but the evidence is there: default settings are generally set to share all of your information with all of your friends; there are few (if any) help pages to assist users in managing their privacy (compare to what Google has been doing to try to educate users); maintain the philosophy that, no matter what, information wants to be shared among everyone; and build systems that share everything, and only make privacy changes when the pressure mounts (i.e., News Feed, Beacon, etc).

Thus, we have identified three Laws of Social Networking:

1. Promoting the open flow of personal information allows maximum profitability
2. Allowing user control over their information flows is counter to profit maximization
3. Provide some privacy controls, but make it hard

I’ll need to think more about this, but welcome any feedback.

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After listening to citizen voices for over two hours, the library board unanimously concluded that its existing policies regarding these texts were sufficient. As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The Library Board on Tuesday night unanimously rejected efforts by a local citizen group to restrict access of young adults to books depicting sex among teenagers or those describing teenage homosexual relationships.

Such books already are separated from children’s books, either in a young adult fiction section on the first floor of the library or shelved as young adult non-fiction alongside similar adult texts on the second floor, board members said.

The nine-member board listened for 2½ hours as nearly 60 people discussed the appropriateness of the library providing such books to the public before the board voted to maintain current policies.

I believe this was the right decision by the library board (but they’re not quite out of the woods yet, unfortunately).

The library board did not, however, appear to take specific action on a separate, but related, request by the complainants, whose petition also asked the Library Board to “balance” its collection of books about homosexuality with books “affirming traditional heterosexual perspectives” that are faith-based or written by “ex-gay” authors.

This is a very problematic request, a fact made clear by SOIS grad student Tony Hoffmann at his Sex, Drugs, and Intellectual Freedom blog. Time will tell if this demand will continue to be put forward by the West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries.

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