Facebook's Timeline & User Privacy

Bukhori Muhammad Aqid, 0806334722 Group J aa.qidd@gmail.com

Facebook's Timeline & User Privacy

Timeline a new Facebook profile Timeline is a new features of Facebook that replaces profile. It morphs personal profiles into timelines that contains every activites of users including update, event, photo. Timeline has three main components : (1) a user's stories (2) apps (3) a new way to express a person's identity. Viewers can sort through information by date, type of media and location. With the introducing of Timeline, there are some responses concerning user privacy. Some letters have been sent to Federal Trade Commision regarding this matter. They are worriyong that people won't take time to filter all their past posts, thus making this feature exposing all of user's data including the sensitive one. Facebook, a huge database of Information In May 2010, Facebook ranks as the top social networking site with more that 400 million active users worldwide. With that much users, of course there are enourmous information posted on the site. In general, most users do not change their default settings, including privacy settings. Facebook's default settings allow all user information to be shared to anyone and even outside the social network. This means that a lot of data is available to the public to see, or even misuse. Although there are settings users can alter, complete control over data seems impossible. Facebook policy changes states that all connections are regarded as public. This allow users to share certain information to more people and third party provider, regardless of the user's will. Critics and charges have been issued by some organization regarding Facebook privacy policy and flaws. For example, at 2005 a simple algorithm can be constructed to gather Facebook user's data because of the predictive URL used by the site. The News Feed feature on 2006 is also receiving a lot of critics regarding privacy issues. Further critism is based on a fact that third parties can use Facebook for data mining, phising and other malicious purposes. Manipulating user pictures, setting up fake user profiles, and publicizing embarrassing private information to harass individuals are other frequently reported forms of malicious mischief on Facebook (Kessler, 2007; Maher, 2007; Privacy Pilfered, 2007; Stehr, 2006). Timeline, prediction and analysis With this new feature, Facebook users will have a new way of sharing their profile. The good news is that you can see everything you've done in Facebook and that way you can hide everything you want. But that requires a lot of effort, especially if you're an old user of Facebook. Another thing is that most of people don't bother to re-check every bit of their activities and just let them be so every other people can see it. This open new problem, especially about identity theft and fraud. Before Timeline, the bad guys can take your data easily, if you don't protect it. After Timeline, they can do it more easily than before because of the neat organizing of your profile data.

Facebook engineers have provide us some privacy options. Even though that there are some flaws, but the current technology is quite useful to protect your Facebook datas. But I think that there should be announcement about the possible misuse of the Timeline. According to the Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts : 'The Rules' especially in the explanation of rule number 5, stated that people who design, develop, deploy, promote or evalute a computing artifact should provide honest, reliable, and understandable information about the artifact, its effects, possible misuses, and, to the extent foreseeable, about the sociotechnical systems in which they think the artifact will be embedded. Facebook, as far as I know doesn't give a warning about the possibilities of Timeline misusing. As a user, we also have the responsibilities to protect our sensitive data with the privacy settings given by Facebook. An advanced user of Facebook will understand this and protect his/her data to prevent indentity theft and fraud. But with the current level of using and understanding of Facebook in Indonesian community, especially teenagers, there will be a big chance for identity theft to steal user's data. In my opinion and experience, most of Indonesian teenagers tend to ignore the privacy options on Facebook. There are some cases when the data is so private that they have to limit the privacy of the data, but usually they will ignore the privacy options and set privacy options of the data so that everyone can read it. With the danger of identity theft, there will be an impact to our social life. Especially if we/our close person ever been the victim, then we'll be more cautious and start to protect all of our data. Because of Facebook's new Timeline expose all of our activities, we have to protect a lot of sensitive data. Event though it requires a lot of effort, prevention is important because once you've been a victim there's no turning back. You can't take back your stolen data and the theft will misuse it freely. My final conclucion is that Timeline is a great and neat feature to organize our Facebook's activites but you will need some efforts to protect your sensitive data in order to prevent the misuse of your data.

REFERENCES Hughes, Brittany N, Horn, Ann-Khatrin, Lovejoy, Jennete P, and Debatin, Bernhard. Facebook and Online Privacy : Attitudes, Behaviors and Unintended Consequences. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. 2009. Miller, Keith W. Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts : 'The Rules'. IEEE Computer Society. 2011 Facebook changes Timeline and Apps Spark New Privacy Concers Washington Post, 27 Sept. 2010. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/facebook-changes-timeline-andapps-spark-new-privacy-concerns/2011/09/26/gIQAl8JfzK_story.html>. Facebook Timeline a New Privacy Test USA Today, 3 Sept. 2011. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/story/2011-11-02/facebook-timelineprivacy/51047658/1>.

There are some characteristics stated on Pancake People article that match with some phenomena happened in Scele Fasilkom UI. In my opinion, here are those characteristics :

pancake people = people who read broadly, but without depth.

There are some phenomena that if there's a long post in Scele, most of people usually skim or even skip it. Especially if the discussion is in Forum Santai or Forum Umum. You can do some searches about skimming or ga baca post and find that people usually didn't read some long post on Scele and they admit that. But I guess It is not a serious disturbing matter. Sometimes that's annoying but usually there will be someone who will correct them. I'm not saying that we should rely on correction and do skimming, but for some discussion cases that doesn't affect much. But still, as an educated fellows, we have to read the previous posts carefully before stating opinions about some issues.

disconfirmation bias : tendency to accept supportive evidence of a belief uncritically but to

actively refute or discount evidence that challenges that belief. This phenomenon usually happened when a particular someone post a thread in Scele Fasilkom UI. Here's one of his post [http://scele.cs.ui.ac.id/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=32032]. At first people responded normally, but because he seldom responds then chaos happened. The chaos happened because (1) he can't express his opinions clearly, and (2) It seems that he refuses any critics/opinion that is not related his belief. This is a quite disturbing matter because everytime he creates a post in scele, the phenomenon happened. I usually consider it an absurd and confusing thread because there are people who bullies him, there are people who asked him nicely, there are people who argue with his opinion, and there are posts that is complicated in terms of grammar, semantic or context. I guess the first solution is to help him translate his opinions into a better phrases. The main problem here is the structure of his posts/opinions are confusing and hard to understand. The second solution is to have a real discussion with the help of experts so that hopefully a win win solution can be obtained.