[facebook and canadian privacy laws]

Time is up for Facebook to find a way to live up to Canada's privacy law after this country's privacy watchdog gave the social-networking website one month to close its "serious privacy gaps."

And if Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's privacy commissioner, isn't satisfied with Facebook's final response Monday, she has two weeks to take the California-based company to Federal Court in Ottawa to try and get a court order requiring it to change its business practices to comply with Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, the country's private-sector privacy law.

[...]

The privacy probe began last year when the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa filed an 11-part complaint, alleging Facebook violated key provisions of Canada's private-sector privacy law.

In addition to an "overarching" concern relating to the "confusing" or "incomplete" way in which Facebook provides information to users about its privacy practices, Stoddart concluded Facebook's policy to indefinitely keep the personal information of people who have deactivated their accounts is contrary to the act.

[...]

But the bigger dispute over Facebook sharing personal information to companies that operate third-party applications on its site is another matter, he said.

In order to download popular games and quizzes, Facebook users must consent to share all their personal information, except their contact details. These companies, totalling nearly one million, operate in 180 countries.

Read more here: http://www.canada.com/technology/Facebook%20must%20satisfy%20Canada%20privacy%20commissioner%20Monday/1899277/story.html

[amplified individuals // amplified leicester]

Sue Thomas is leading a project - Amplified Leicester - a city-wide experiment in social media, and there'll be an opportunity to participate on the 11th of September:

We're looking for people who are open-minded, enthusiastic and curious.

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment to
- explore diversity and innovation
- build a network across diverse communities
- create, share and develop new ideas
- use social media like Facebook and Twitter as an amplifier

This is an opportunity to work with people you might otherwise never meet and learn how to:
- benefit from Leicester's huge diversity of people and cultures
- generate lots of new ideas quickly
- think like a futurist and see the bigger picture
- organise and collaborate better
- be persuasive in different social situations
- share and develop creative ideas
- manage the stream of information which bombards us every day
- choose the best people to collaborate with
- make the most of different kinds of resources - social, economic, creative

Participation is free of charge but places are limited. Deadline for applications Friday 11th September 2009.

Find out more and download an application form from http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://www.amplifiedleicester.com

For an informal chat, please contact Sue Thomas or Thilo Boeck:
Sue Thomas t: 0116 207 8266 e: sue.thomas@dmu.ac.uk
Thilo Boeck t: 0116 2577879 e: tgboeck@dmu.ac.uk

Amplified Leicester is managed by the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in partnership with the DMU Centre for Social Action and Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The project is commissioned and supported by NESTA, an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative.

“A group that thinks in diverse ways will address a problem from many angles.” Charles Leadbeater, The Difference Dividend

Note: Also of interest, a talk by Andrea Saveri on amplified individuals or this presentation which Andrea did for last year's NLab Social Networks conference.

[getting fired over facebook use]

From The Age:

"About three weeks ago, Roseanna Brisbane, after a long day doing casual work for a Queensland Government agency, updated her Facebook status saying that in future she would be "saying no to working for shitty Government departments".

She did not name the department or any individuals in her message but a colleague and Facebook friend saw the update and passed it on to her boss. She was promptly "escorted out of the building" on her next day back at work.

She said she was a casual so had few options in terms of unfair dismissal claims.

Brisbane, 20, believed she was targeted because of a back injury she obtained at work that restricted her productivity.

Her mother, Jillian, said she could understand critics who say people should be careful about what they publish online. But young people saw Facebook as their main tool for communicating privately with friends and did not expect their bosses to be spying on them.

"It is becoming the Soviet state type thing where you're scared of talking to someone in case they go and tell someone else," she said.

[...]

Another reader, Bummer, was fired from his job on his first day over Facebook comments he made regarding the company's long recruitment process. He did not mention the company name and expected the comments were private but later found out he was not using the correct Facebook privacy settings.

"I don't agree that employers should use social networking tools to learn more about their employees as most people's 'social' personality and 'work' personality are vastly different. I definitely learned the hard way," the reader said.

[...]

Last week this website reported several other examples of Australians being sacked or disciplined over seemingly innocuous online posts, including the case of a man who says he was fired from his job at a "large corporate bank" for using the word "recession" in his Facebook profile.

Furthermore, the NSW Department of Corrective Services is threatening to sack prison officers over posts they made to a Facebook group criticising the cash-strapped State Government's plans to privatise Parklea and Cessnock prisons."

[facebook listens to the public]

After suffering public outrage (including a Facebook group) when Facebook changed their terms of service, Facebook has reverted to the original rules:

So, the people do have a voice. Shame that didn't work when around 2 million people protested against the war in London.

[twitter and future of creative technologies]

On Thursday at The Future of Creative Technologies Conference it was bandied around that twitter, though used, isn't really worth (financially) much. In fact, when someone suggested that twitter and business model don't go hand in hand there were quite a few appreciative guffaws. A recent post by Steve Clayton also touches on the subject: "Wow…quite a story from Kara Swisher today that Facebook was interested in buying Twitter

for $500m. Okay, I love Twitter as much as anyone but $500m is a big chunk of cash for something that isn’t making money at the moment. That’s not to say that it couldn’t and I think the only way Twitter is going is up but in the current climate, that’s a big wedge.

Personally I think Twitter is right to hold out but hope it’s all a big game of Russian roulette."

Photo by John Wardell (Netinho) on flickr.

[facebook and job-hunting politics]

According to Toni Bowers at Tech Republic, hiring managers are increasingly discovering the need to address "casual" communication (texts, e-mails) from potential job candidates. She notes:

"While text-messaging lingo might be completely natural to these young people — indeed, for some it’s the only way they communicate — they fail to notice that those in positions of authority (who tend to be older) find such methods of communication disrespectful."

Funnily enough in today's column, Bowers tells us about hiring managers who do the opposite, they actually send out friend invitations to potential employees....The job candidate in question explains:

"To be honest, my face is in no book, I have no space, I’m neither linked in, nor linked out. I just don’t have any interest in social networking."

Akward position? There are 20 comments so far that say so.

[bah: facebook]

[tagging folksonomies]

Working on my presentation for the Reading Revolution seminar due to be given at Penguin headquarters on Tuesday (soooo soon!) has relight my thinking on tagging. As I was leafing through Facebook and contemplating how this site illustrates the community and collaborative spirit of contemporary literacies (i.e. transliteracy) I began to visit people's "stories" (well, feeds of their stories) rather than linking directly to people and noticed how they are tagging their status. I say "tagging" rather than narrating because the stories are more like bits of information which the reader pieces together to create a story or profile of the person/organisation. As an example, friend a "is loving his anonymous gifts" and friend b "is a pirate. Aaaarrrggghhh." These two phrases, seem to me, to work as identity or status tags, giving the reader an idea of what's going on rather than the *whole* (I mean in an entirely problematic postmodern critical kind of way) story. Does the (over)use of the copula "to be" signify anything about people's states; in perpetuum?

Facebook has the new tagging application so users can tag (describe) friends...I've started describing myself (is that ego-tagging?). What I'd like to know: is Facebook tagging evolving in ways similar to delicious (using oft' cited tags rather than creating new ones, working with the community, etc...). In other words, are there "standards" for Facebooking? I wonder if tagging is moving from user-centric preferences to community-centric?

xposted at Frontline Books