March 28, 2024

Tool Kit: Protecting Your Privacy on the New Facebook

It can be scoured by police officers, partners and would-be employers. It can be mined by marketers to show tailored advertisements.

And now, with Facebook’s newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers, along with “friends” on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you like and where you go.

Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can see your “likes” and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of yourself to expose to marketers.

The latest of its frequent changes to the site’s privacy settings was made in December. Facebook is nudging each of its billion subscribers to review them.

The nudge could not have been more timely, said Sarah Downey, a lawyer with the Boston company Abine, which markets tools to help users control their visibility online. “It is more important than ever to lock down your Facebook privacy settings now that everything you post will be even easier to find,” she said.

That is to say, your settings will determine, to a large extent, who can find you when they search for women who buy dresses for toddlers or, more unsettling, women who jog a particular secluded trail.

What can you do? Ask yourself four simple questions.

QUESTION 1 How would you like to be found?

Go to “who can see my stuff” on the upper right side of your Facebook page. Click on “see more settings.” By default, search engines can link to your timeline. You can turn that off if you wish.

Go to “activity log.” Here you can review all your posts, pictures, “likes” and status updates. If you are concerned about who can see what, look at the original privacy setting of the original post.

In my case, I had been tagged eating a bowl of ricotta with my fingers at midnight near Arezzo. My friend who posted the picture enabled it to be seen by anyone, which means that it would show up in a stranger’s search for, I don’t know, people who eat ricotta with their fingers at midnight. I am tagged in other photos that are visible only to friends of the person who posted them.

The point is, you want to look carefully at what the original settings are for those photos and “likes,” and decide whether you would like to be associated with them “I don’t get this Facebook thing either,” said one woman whose friend request I had accepted in January 2008. “But everyone in our generation seems to be on it.”

If you are concerned about things that might embarrass or endanger you on Facebook — Syrians who endorse the opposition may not want to be discovered by government apparatchiks — comb through your timeline and get rid of them. The only way to ensure that a post or photo is not discovered is to “unlike” or “delete” it.

Make yourself a pot of tea. This may take a while. The nostalgia may just be amusing.

QUESTION 2 What do you want the world to know about you?

Go to your profile page and click “About me.” Decide if you would like your gender, or the name of your spouse, to be visible on your timeline. Think about whether you want your birthday to be seen on your timeline. Your date of birth is an important piece of personal information for hackers to exploit.

A tool created a couple of weeks ago by a team of college students offers to look for certain words and phrases that could embarrass other college students as they apply for internships and jobs. It is called Simplewash, formerly Facewash, and it looks for profanity, references to drugs and other faux pas that you do not necessarily want, say, a law school admissions officer to see.

Socioclean is another application that scours your Facebook posts. It is selling its service to college campuses to offer to students.

QUESTION 3 Do you mind being tracked by advertisers?

Facebook has eyes across the Web; one study found that its so-called widget — the innocuous blue letter “f” — is integrated into 20 percent of the 10,000 most popular Web sites.

This is how it works. I browsed an e-commerce site for girls’ dresses. When I logged back on to Facebook several days later, I was urged to buy dresses for “my darling daughter.”

Facebook says that this kind of “retargeting” is a lucrative source of revenue. If that is annoying, several tools can help you block trackers. Abine, DisconnectMe and Ghostery offer browser extensions. Once installed on your Web browser, these extensions will tell you how many trackers they have blocked.

If you see an ad on the right rail of your Facebook page based on your Web browsing history, you can also opt out directly on Facebook. Hover over the “X” next to the ad and choose from the drop-down menu: “Hide this ad,” you could say.

Or hide all ads from this brand. Facebook does not serve the ads itself, so to opt out of certain kinds of targeted ads, you must go to the third party that Facebook works with to show ads based on the Web sites you have browsed.

QUESTION 4 Whom do you want to befriend?

Now is the time to review whom you count among your Facebook friends. Your boss? Do you really want her to see pictures of you in Las Vegas? And the woman you met in Lamaze class: do you want the apps she has installed to know who you are? Privacyfix.com, a browser extension, shows you how to keep your friends’ Facebook applications from sucking you into their orbit. It is preparing to introduce a tool to control what it calls your “exposure” to the Facebook search engine.

Secure.me offers a similar feature. Depending on your privacy settings, that photo-sharing app that your Lamaze compatriot just installed could, in one click, know who you are and have access to all the photos that you thought you were sharing with “friends.”

One of Facebook’s cleverest heists is the word “friend.” It makes you think all your Facebook contacts are really your “friends.” They may not be.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/technology/personaltech/protecting-your-privacy-on-the-new-facebook.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economic View: When Business Can’t Foresee Consumer Outrage — Economic View

Consider Bank of America’s move to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards. The bank eventually decided against the fee, but not before helping to create a storm big enough to induce many people to move their business away from large banks to credit unions.

For late-night comedians, the brouhaha was irresistible. On Halloween, Jay Leno chimed in. “One kid wanted to charge me five bucks to give him candy,” Mr. Leno began. “I said, ‘Who are you supposed to be?’ He said, ‘Bank of America.’ ”

For hints about how to avoid the consumer backlash, the bank’s executives might have consulted a paper I wrote in 1986 with the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the economist Jack Knetsch. The central question was this: What actions by companies do people consider “unfair”?

Our method was to ask randomly selected people some simple questions by telephone. Here is an example:

“A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store raises the price to $20. Please rate this action as: completely fair, acceptable, unfair, very unfair.” Some 82 percent of the participants called it either unfair or very unfair.

To be sure, we weren’t trying to figure out what is fair. That task is best left to philosophers. We were trying only to determine what actions customers perceive as unfair. As the responses illustrate, most people don’t view a spike in demand as an acceptable excuse to raise prices.

Such judgments are puzzling to economists, business executives and M.B.A. students. I have posed the same snow-shovel question to students in my course on managerial decision-making — and only 24 percent have said that raising the price is unfair. And it isn’t hard to see why: they have learned in economics classes that when demand increases and supply is limited, prices must rise to prevent shortages. What the students don’t realize is that the rest of the population may view such actions as gouging.

Many businesses implicitly understand this. After a hurricane, products like plywood and bottled water are in great demand. Local stores, including branches of large chains, keep the long run in mind and typically supply such products without raising prices. Other “entrepreneurs,” who have no such long-run concerns, will buy a load of plywood and sell it off the back of a truck at premium prices.

Both the stores and the truck owner may be making good business decisions. The stores want to build loyalty, and the truck owner wants to make some money — and provide a good that is in high demand. If people are angry, they don’t have to buy the plywood.

LARGE businesses can face problems, however, when they forget about the long term and start acting like the truck owner.

Bank of America is not the first company, or even the first bank, to make this mistake. In 1995, First Chicago imposed a $3 fee to use a teller for a transaction that could be conducted with an A.T.M. A storm of protest erupted. (Mr. Leno had a good line on that one, too: “So, if you want to talk to a human, it’s $3. But the good news is, for $3.95 you can talk dirty to her, so that’s O.K.”)

It took until 2002 for the company, by then called Bank One, to eliminate the fee and to acknowledge that it had been a public relations error.

Why can’t managers anticipate that their actions might provoke such outrage? The best explanation may be that people’s fairness judgments are gut reactions, not economic analyses. As Mr. Kahneman explains in his new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” these are the types of judgments we make instinctively rather than reflectively. Feeling your blood boil typically does not involve careful calculation.

The fact that we react instinctively to some company actions can also mean that the public anger may be misplaced. Bank of America’s debit card fee was public and transparent — generally desirable features of a pricing policy, though they may not be good for public relations. Unfortunately, more unsavory actions that are less visible may be less likely to provoke customer fervor.

In a case I consider much more troubling, Bank of America recently settled a class-action lawsuit regarding overdraft fees on debit cards. Two bank policies were called out in the lawsuit. First, when a customer ran out of money and used a debit card, the bank would allow the purchase to go through — as a courtesy, it said — and then charge a fee of $35. Worse, the bank was accused of processing a day’s transactions in this order: from the largest to the smallest, rather than in the sequence in which they were actually made.

This practice could put the customer over the limit with an end-of-day shoes purchase that would then trigger a series of $35 penalties on small purchases made earlier in the day when the customer actually still had money in her account. (Bank of America settled the case without admitting any wrongdoing.)

Regulators now require banks to ask customers whether they want overdraft protection, rather than just assuming that they do. I like this rule, but it is futile to think that regulators can or should try to prohibit every fee that customers find obnoxious. Businesses can think of new fees faster than regulators can ban them.

Instead, it would be better to ensure that all fees are transparent and salient. As I have said in a previous column, the best way to do this is to require a business to give its customers an electronic file that details all of its prices, as well as the customer’s past use.  Then, with one click, a customer could then  import the data into third-party Web sites that could help search for the best deal. Without such disclosure, businesses have strong incentives to make any price increases as inconspicuous as possible.

If you run a business, meanwhile, you might think twice about charging for a service that has traditionally been free. If you’re not careful, you could get some unwanted publicity from Jay Leno.

Richard H. Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e9789d1440fcfe51ec286cb288d18f7f