Perry

Hewitt

Tag: privacy

  • 5 tips for your post-college social media self

    female graduate 1931If you’re reading this somewhere between finishing your last college final and returning the polyester academic robe crumpled on the floor of your dorm room, you’re in the commencement process. Your brain is on emotional and practical overload: you’re simultaneously figuring out how to say goodbye to friends; planning for (or praying for!) a new internship, job, or grad school; and wondering how on earth to pack up all the stuff you’ve accumulated during your college years. Here’s a manageable to-do list: five ways for new graduates to get your digital and social media presence in order.

    1. Set up and clean up your LinkedIn profile. Of the five profiles sent to me this week from recent grads, three of them had typos — and two candidates had misspelled their major. Have a friend read your profile for common sense, grammar, and spelling. Do the same for a Google+ profile. Pro tip: try your name on Google image search and see what comes up. If you don’t like what you see, update your online profiles and let indexing do its work.
    2. Review your social media privacy settings. If you’re 21 today, you were 12 when Facebook launched, 14 when Twitter emerged, and are now far too old to be messing around on Snapchat. Younger users tend to be savvier about privacy settings, but just in case: read these Facebook basics and settings controlling who can find you, then hop over to Google and check out Me on the Web. While not all companies will hire through Twitter like this the web is, increasingly, your resume.
    3. Put together a listening system. Are you still looking for a job or entering a new field? Set up a system of alerts and feeds to keep you informed. Google Alerts have been around forever but are surprisingly useful — enter one or more terms relevant to your area of interest. For blogs and sites you follow, try feedly and its fantastic mobile interface. Use the content you follow to your advantage — at very least you’re staying informed, and at best you’ll have current and relevant ideas to share with co-workers.
    4. Manage your inbox and contacts effectively. Email is an overwhelming and unwieldy system where, some say, information goes to die. Gmail does have a number of features to improve email management from starred senders to priority inbox; check out Lifehacker for a useful selection of hacks. Mobile email ninjas may do well mastering all the swipe actions of Mailbox to prevent overload. And while a new grad won’t need a fully-fledged contact management system, be sure to keep your contacts in a way that ensures they’re accessible and in context.
    5. Own your own domain and a sensible email address. It’s true that each new release of gTLDs makes your URL less relevant and search and social more important. That said, for less than 10 bucks a year you can have your own domain name, and refer it to a profile page on LinkedIn or about.me. And now’s the time to set up email forwarding via your academic institution, if they offer it, or settle on an email address that omits your year of birth or favorite Twilight character.

    Congratulations! The good news is that it’s neither difficult nor costly to set up a reasonable online presence. The even better news is that digital and social technologies provide you with the keys to find and connect with people and ideas to continue learning beyond the campus you’re leaving behind.

     

    Photo credit: Ladies Home Journal 1931, courtesy George Eastman House

  • How to navigate child consent in the digital era

    With college students, obviously, we assume that they are young adults–even there, we still need to do a lot more to educate them as they, too, struggle deal with the ramifications of privacy in a networked world where exposure can get out of control much quicker and in hard-to-anticipate manner.

    — Your Children are not Your Children, a post by Zeynep Tufekci in response to recent exposure of children in the media by their parents and journalists. Tufekci objects to the widespread oversimplification of privacy that if there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just fine to make it public, and points to the risks of exposure for children far below the age of reasonable consent.

    Many adults are now diligent documenters of their own milestones and minutia through images on social networks and newly-quantifiable data captured through apps and wristbands. Young hipsters transform seemingly overnight into dads who post everything from in utero shots to Vine video of their toddlers daily. Was the 2009 David After Dentist video intended to be exploitative, or a way to share an amusing parental anecdote in a contemporary way?

    It’s a more complex world in which parents now navigate child consent. Parents receive pressure from schools to sign blanket image consent forms, which meant a lot less when the biggest risk was a flattering shot in a private school marketing brochure or a spelling bee win on the cover of the community weekly. There’s a structural lag for both individual parental and social/institutional approaches to privacy in the internet era, and most are making it up as they go along. And, as Tufekci points out above, college students are not magically immune, but face similar challenges figuring out privacy boundaries and the ramifications of broad exposure.

  • Privacy in a world of indiscriminate tracking

    privacy lockHow do we understand privacy in a world full of tracking? This week Julia Angwin spoke at the Shorenstein Center (recap here), and offered a high level overview of some of the privacy concerns specific to the data-rich world we  inhabit today. These ranged from the specter of government surveillance drones over U.S. cities tracking your every movement to car dealers fully briefed on your online research before you enter the showroom, so they know what to sell you. (Personally, I find the car dealer scenario more ominous.)

    Angwin spent some time describing behaviors that are legal but problematic for our current social norms. How buried can the fine print of authorization and consent be on websites and applications? I don’t know many people who click through Apple’s 50-odd screens of Terms & Conditions before they update their iPhone software, nor do I find it easy to retrospectively find one-click agreements for YouTube channels. Can corporations argue that this constitutes informed consent, or is this a kind of specious authorization that should be regulated?

  • More than you wanted to know about your Facebook use, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha

    It takes a curious mixture of narcissism, introspection, and discipline to engage in personal analytics on any level, much less dialed up to Feltronesque quantified self. This quick download of my Facebook activity since September 2010 confirms:

    • I use words (189) more than pictures (47), and neglect video (1) almost entirely
    • My friends are a bit more female (53%) than male (47%), hail from 24 countries, and include 1 fervent monarchist
    • Inexplicably, I post most often at 9pm on a Tuesday night

    Aside from the vague shock of realizing where one’s time goes (I recommend Rescue Time for a sobering application analyzing web use), the possibilities for personal analytics are enormous. Nike+ FuelBand is a great example of a personal analytics service that’s addictive and competitive, and effectively connects long term fitness goals to short term behavior.

    What are the effects of aggregating personal behaviors at this level — not even explicit consumer tastes, just daily habits? We live our lives in public as never before, and what may seem mundane — the precise time we’re gazing into the iPhone’s glowing screen on a Tuesday evening — could lead to useful personal insights, relevant commercial applications, and of course privacy concerns.