October 10, 2024

Bucks Blog: Friday Reading: Is Private School Not Expensive Enough?

August 29

Wednesday Reading: A Great Time to Visit Martha’s Vineyard

A great time to visit Martha’s Vineyard, a Facebook app that aims to keep photos private, finding your ideal running form and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/friday-reading-is-private-school-not-expensive-enough/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Bucks Blog: Wednesday Reading: A Great Time to Visit Martha’s Vineyard

August 29

Wednesday Reading: A Great Time to Visit Martha’s Vineyard

A great time to visit Martha’s Vineyard, a Facebook app that aims to keep photos private, finding your ideal running form and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/wednesday-reading-a-great-time-to-visit-marthas-vineyard/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder Blog: Facebook Gives Users a Primer on Ads

Millions of users who visited their Facebook pages on Wednesday may have noticed a light blue banner that read: “About Ads: Ever wonder how Facebook makes money? Get the Details.” Clicking on a link in the text took visitors to a page that explained why Facebook users see the ads they see.

“It takes a lot of money to hire the best engineers and build the technology needed to keep Facebook up and running,” a Facebook product manager named Ami explains in a video on the page.

According to Ami, that cost was $1 billion last year. To offset those costs, advertising keeps Facebook free for users.

“Unlike ads on television, ads on Facebook respond to your direct feedback,” the narrator says. Users can click on ads they don’t like and ask not to be shown similar ads in the future. “The ads on Facebook are meant to be useful, not disrupt your experience.”

While the new advertising page may be useful to some Facebook users who are curious about advertising, it also comes at a time when many users are increasingly concerned about their privacy online and whether their personal data is being shared with advertisers.

To address that concern, the new page explains that Facebook does not sell a user’s personal information, but instead it makes money by showing the right ads to the right audience.

Facebook has many different types of ads, but the ones that have been getting the most attention over the last few days are called “sponsored stories,” which, as reported in the technology blog TechCrunch, will begin appearing in user’s newsfeeds in 2012.

TechCrunch writer Josh Constine explains: “The ability to display promoted content alongside organic social content in the popular and highly addictive news feed is essentially the holy grail for advertisers. While users are attentively browsing photos and updates from friends, they’ll end up consuming ads as well.”

Facebook has been increasingly working with advertisers and advertising agencies by hosting “hackathons” and attempting to teach agencies how to better use the social networking platform.

In April, the company announced a new social ad unit created by Leo Burnett Chicago, part of the Publicis Groupe, that would allow advertisers to ask users questions. Other existing interactive ad units allow users to click that on an ad they “like”, answer questions in a poll, respond to event ads, accept free product samples, watch videos or use Facebook applications.

A Facebook representative issued this statement when asked about the new advertising page: “Educating people about how Facebook works is really important to us. We have a number of educational resources available, including in-line tips, a Help Center, a Safety Center, and a variety of Facebook Pages for different audiences and topics. Along these lines, we recently launched a page that we hope helps people better understand how advertising on Facebook works. We’ll be doing a number of similar proactive initiatives on different topics throughout the coming year.”

But no matter what users think about ads, or how much they know about them, one thing remains true: they cannot opt out of seeing them.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c863974a8bb9c36aa40e2b2fed8de28b

Bits Blog: Privacy Fades in Facebook Era

Privacy is a rare commodity today with the high amount of information being posted on social networking sites such as Facebook.David Paul Morris/Bloomberg NewsPrivacy is a rare commodity today with the high amount of information being posted on social networking sites such as Facebook.

As much as it pains me to say this: privacy is on its deathbed. I came to this sad realization recently when a stranger began leaving comments on photos I had uploaded to Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app.

After several comments — all of which were nice — I began wondering who this person was. Now the catch here is that she had used only a first name on her Instagram profile. You would think a first name online is enough to conceal your identity.

Trust me, it’s not.

So I set out, innocently and curiously, to figure who she was.

I knew this person lived in San Francisco, from her own photos. At first I tried Google, but a first name and city were not enough to narrow it down. Then I went to her photos and looked for people whom she had responded to in the comments. Eventually I found a conversation with someone clearly her friend. I easily found that person’s full name, went to the person’s Facebook friend list and searched for my commenter’s first name.

There it was: a full name. With that, I searched Google and before I knew it, I had this person’s phone number, home address and place of employment.

Creepy, right? I even had a link to a running app that she uses that showed the path of her morning run. This took all of 10 minutes.

Nearly everyone has done something like this. Often, you don’t even need a first name to find someone. Google, after all, has a feature that allows people to search with an actual image. No words or names required.

A friend who works in technology recently told me I would never be able to figure out her age online. She had gone to great lengths to hide it. It took me exactly two minutes. How? I found a photo on Facebook from her birthday party two years earlier. In the photo, on the corner of a table, sat a birthday cake that said “Happy Birthday,” and two candles that said “24.”

“We used to have privacy through obscurity online, so even if people had that information out there, the steps that it would take to aggregate it all were too great,” said Elizabeth Stark, a lecturer in law at Stanford who teaches about privacy on the Internet. “Previously you could have searched every photo on the Internet for a photo of Nick Bilton until you eventually found one, but that would take a lifetime. Now, facial recognition software can return more images about someone instantly.”

So who is at fault for this lack of privacy protection? Most people are oblivious. The companies won’t stop collecting information. And the government is slow to protect consumer privacy.

The Federal Trade Commission, set up to protect consumers, didn’t act until late last month when it cited Facebook for “unfair and deceptive” practices. This is great, but it is more than six years and 800 million users after Facebook began.

Maneesha Mithal, the associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s division of privacy and identity protection, acknowledged in a phone interview that technology had moved quicker than the government could act. The F.T.C.’s investigation of Facebook, she said, “has been a bit of a moving target.”

Ms. Stark of Stanford says she doesn’t believe that privacy is completely dead. She says people have learned from each privacy debacle. But the companies are not slowing down.

The tools that aggregate information are only getting smarter. The government isn’t getting faster. And Ms. Mithal said not much could be done about the damage already inflicted. “Our order only provides protection going forward,” she said. “The only real option to protect information going backwards would be to delete your Facebook account.”

Now which one of us is going to do that?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ea0671e3c371398d04aff0cfb479161d

The Week’s Business News in Photos

After weeks of protest in central Madrid, demonstrators were packing up their encampment at the Puerta del Sol on Monday. The protestors object to Spain’s handling of its economic crisis and to the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/06/18/business/weekly-business-photos.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

This Week’s Business News in Photos

The nation’s biggest law firms are creating a second tier of workers, stripping pay and prestige from one of the most coveted jobs in the business world. Heather Boylan Clark, 34, was a seventh-year associate at Jones Day before applying for a career associate position after the birth of her second child. She makes 40 percent less than before, but says she still does “challenging work,” and, more important, has greater control of her schedule. She is with her daughter, Abigail, 4, and her son, Henry, 2.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=bdbd5759f5bef25b2d33dc1bcfa4a985