Half-baked ideas about friendly machines and their users
The Science and Technology Knesset committee had discussed privacy in location-based services, following similar discussions in the U.S. Congress and in the EU. Parts of my testimony is quoted in the news coverage of Calcalist below (Hebrew).
http://www.calcalist.co.il/internet/articles/0,7340,L-3552588,00.html
Our paper, “Super-Ego: A Framework for Privacy-Sensitive Bounded Context-Awareness“, had won the best paper award in CASEMANS 2011! The paper describes a method for deciding automatically which places a person might like to share with others. We try to study the effectiveness of manual intervention in this process, and find out that just by passing a small fraction of devisions to the user, the efficiency of the algorithm greatly improve.
BranchOut, the new Facebook-embedded professional social network for professional relations. In short, linked-in riding your Facebook network. Its not a bad idea, and it seems to get some traction around my social network.
However, I think that most BranchOut users would be surprised to see that their information is shared with “everyone”, including recruiting companies. Go to BranchOut -> Pull the combo under your picture -> Settings -> Privacy Settings, and then you would be able to see that the default privacy settings for BranchOut is:
Why is this a problem? As BranchOut is a Facebook application, I would expect that information that I pass to BranchOut would be shared according to my Facebook sharing preferences. Their privacy policy says that they share “just” BranchOut information. However, this is private enough, and includes the people you connect with on BranchOut, past positions, and education.
Just saw this little UI nugget from Google on a result page:
It seems that Google is trying to link my Twitter account to my Google profile, for personalization purposes. However, the fact that it appeared in the search results page is somewhat disturbing. This is not the context we regularly relate to social applications, such as Twitter.
After clicking on “yes”, I got this option:
I refused that option: I can never understand Google profiles.
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