Julianna Yau’s blog

On September 15, Facebook was dotted with profiles, sans profile pictures. This was done in protest of the recent arts funding cuts which were discovered, without warning, consultation or announcement, to show how the loss of arts & culture would mean a loss of cultural identity for Canadians.

I participated in this protest, and will join those who are remaining faceless until the election, such as Chris Foley. Being faceless for a day was very difficult for me, because I use the profile to showcase my recent sculptures, and my sculptures are part of who I am. Instead of seeing one of my creations, having to look at the ghostly silhouette of a nameless person was more than unsettling.

What was most telling of how intimitately connected our identity is with art & culture is the variety of Facless For the Arts profile pictures created by users so they can show they are faceless specificially in support of art & culture.

So as part of my work to raise awareness about the impacts and implications of the arts funding cuts, I will be faceless not merely in Facebook, but in all my online social networks.

Yesterday, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada wrote about Facebook’s laxness on privacy and third-party applications. I was a bit surprised by the quality of the post, because their blog typically provides a good amount of relevant information. However, even after following the links in the post, I found it difficult to piece together (a) how the applications can “steal” your information, or (b) what the applications can steal.

It wasn’t until I followed a link from one of the BBC articles to Click’s advice for worried Facebook users that I understood what the concern is. Applications can have access to your name, networks and lists of friends, plus your selection of the following:

• Profile Picture
• Basic Info
• Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)
• Current location (what city you’re in)
• Education history
• Work history
• Profile status
• Wall
• Notes
• Groups you belong to
• Events you’re invited to
• Photos taken by you
• Photos taken of you
• Relationship status
• Online presence
• What type of relationship you’re looking for
• What sex you’re interested in
• Who you’re in a relationship with
• Religious views

This was certainly not news to me (particularly after I wrote a Primer on Privacy & Facebook, available as a PDF or OpenDocument download. Although I agree that it would be good for Facebook to more actively promote usage of their privacy settings (someone suggested that they include a privacy setting walkthrough in the post-setup activities), I more strongly believe that users need to start taking accountability for learning to use the privacy controls at their disposal.

Last week, Facebook launched their new privacy control settings. Soon afterwards, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada picked up on a supposed flaw of the update. Although the flaw is true, it is (as many have pointed out), not a new flaw.

This weekend, I have updated my Primer on Privacy & Facebook, available as a PDF or OpenDocument download. The primer is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada licence. If you have any feedback on the primer, feel free to leave a comment on this post or contact me directly.

Last week, I was reflecting on the fact that my cynicism actually protects me from quite a bit of frustration. This reflection came just in time for me to be aware that because I don’t expect anything to be done for the right reasons, I am not shocked to find capitalists behind the bubbly front of social networking sites. I do, however, still experience quite a bit of frustration because I maintain that things should still be done properly, and am often called an idealist for that reason…but that’s a whole other discussion.

Tom Hodgkinson’s article on the “shady” inner workings of Facebook sound, to me, like the lamentations of someone who is more naive than insightful.

I totally respect the fact that there are many people out there who choose not to participate on websites like Facebook (even though I give some of them a hard time, just for fun). Like phones, email, post mail, VOIP, instant messaging and “the rest”, a social networking site is merely a tool, and doesn’t work for everyone.

Personally, I like maintaining regular contact with friends and colleagues through Facebook because it allows me to do it on my own time. Of course, it’s no substitute for in-person interaction but I find it very handy for keeping abreast of my friends’ more mundane events. By doing so, I’ve noticed that when I have lunch with a friend, we can have more [frequent and valuable] meaningful conversations without having to play catch-up firstly.

If someone else wants to use it as a make-shift dating site or homage to themselves, do I really care? Not so long as I continue to be able to ignore their requests to be my friend. Like in a high school or any other social space, cliques form naturally and most people gravitate towards others who are there for similar purposes. I’m sure the people who are merely on Facebook to boost their self-image think that people like me are taking the fun out of Facebook by using it to network professionally, but don’t really care because there’s enough space for us all.

Hodgkinson’s profiles on the brains and finances behind Facebook were actually a very interesting read. I’m sure he had intended for the information to show how that Facebook is really being operated by “The Man”, but I found their histories to be quite cool. I had not known about Peter Thiel prior to reading Hodgkinson’s article, but found his work to be extremely exciting. I know my affinity towards Thiel is mostly due to “The Diversity Myth”, which he co-wrote, because it seems to be a more expansive version of the same realization I reached in high school during one of our many assemblies to “celebrate multiculturalism”.

Although I don’t think Facebook is perfect (far from it; I agree with Hodgkinson’s, and most other people’s, dislike for the recent fiasco over the opt-out/opt-in problem with Beacon), many of the problems Hodgkinson has with Facebook are not unique to Facebook.

1 Everyone will advertise at you

Facebook doesn’t charge for membership, and instead uses advertisement as its main source of revenue. Even newspapers like The Guardian, in which Hodgkinson’s article was published, use advertisement. Not only do many other businesses use ads, and targeted ads, as part of their revenue source, not all of them are transparent about their ad targeting practices.

2 Nothing ever gets deleted on the internet

Maybe not nothing ever gets deleted, but data retention is a huge issue which is not limited to Facebook. You’ve got to be very new to the internet if you aren’t aware that anything you put online will probably exist until the end of time (or at least the end of the internet), either online, on a backup, or on someone’s personal computer.

3 Privacy isn’t guaranteed anywhere anymore

Social networking sites may make private detectives a thing of the past, only to be relived in Film Noir, and are certainly making people realize that privacy is an illusion. While I don’t agree that privacy should be allowed to be an illusion, I also realize that anyone who really wants to know about my most intimate confessions will find a way to do so, whether I’m on Facebook or not. Luckily, I don’t think anyone really cares to do so.

4 Facebook only knows what you tell it

Most of the information you give Facebook for it to build a profile on you is optional. Users need to take responsibility for how they share their information. If you’re going to do it through Facebook, of course they’re going to use that data. Duh. Many of the fields, like your gender and marital status, are optional. So are the bajillion applications which harvest more information about users. Just because you’re presented with a field doesn’t mean you need to complete it. Social networking sites need to be responsible for how they use the data they have, but the users who provide that data share that responsibility and need to start owning up to it.

5 Opting out doesn’t mean closed communication…ever

If Hodgkinson ever read any other privacy policy (like the one for a financial institution or utilities company), he’s probably likely to find that they also indicate that opting out of notifications will not cease all communications. I assume those clauses exist so that the company with which you’re doing business can still contact you if there’s a problem with your account—whether they abuse that is a whole other issue, and I have yet to be spammed by Facebook. They actually deliver fewer direct mailings (via email) to me than my credit card companies, opting instead to broadcast updates on their blog.

6 The CIA would probably look at your stuff anyway, if they really needed to

Does anyone really think that the CIA, or any other homeland security organization, would not be able to access your information on a social networking site just because that site’s TOS didn’t say that they could? I don’t.

Michael Geist picked up on an article which argues for e-petitions to have more weight in politics. And although I have signed a few e-petitions and joined many Facebook groups, I still have misgivings about the nature of click votes and petitions in general.

Matthew Ingram has reflected upon the usefulness of click votes in response to the CBC’s Great Canadian Wish List which was generated on Facebook. Even today, I marvelled at the fact that one of my friends on Facebook joined 45,853 other fans (as of the writing of this post) of the Heath Ledger Memorial page, while Geist’s heavily advertised Fair Copyright for Canada group sits at 39,470 members (and Facebook tells me that there are 374 new members…and I have yet to figure out the time span used to calculate a “new” member), and my little
Canada needs a public inquiry into copyright! group reports 1 fewer member, totalling at 114 members. Does this really mean that more people care about Ledger’s tragic death than fair copyright for Canada? Or that 39,356 people who think we should have fair copyright in Canada don’t think Canada needs a public inquiry for copyright? I certainly wouldn’t use the numbers from a Facebook group or page as the source of statistics for any real purpose.

I don’t think the issue is with fraudulent votes or signatures. Like traditional petitions, fraudulent signatures are a problem, but so is the value of the petition itself. As I have stated before, it is entirely too easy to sign something. I really do believe that, unless someone is actively against something, when asked to show support by doing something easy like signing a petition, they are likely to do so. That does not necessarily mean they understand the issues enough to be making a real decision, or that they truly care enough to do something real about it.

Steven Sandor writes about the copyright legislation delay. Sandor focuses on one of the concerns I have, which is the anti-DMCA/WCT position being co-opted as the anti-all-copyright position, based primarily on the fact that [some] people don’t feel they should have to pay for anything.

The Privacy Commissioner blog has a great post about privacy rights and data portability, pointing to the Privacy Manifesto for the Web 2.0 Era drafted by Alec Saunders and the Data Portability project.

Yesterday, Facebook issued an apology for the poor product launch of Facebook Beacon and added the option for users to block all Beacon updates in the “Privacy Settings for External Websites” portion of their privacy settings page.

I’m sorry that Beacon was so poorly launched. I enjoy sharing my activities with my friends (to their amusement or annoyance), sending updates on the movies I’ve watched, blog postings I’ve written, books I’m reading and websites I’ve visited, and creating about a bajillion status updates. Being extremely concerned about privacy,  I also enjoy having full control over exactly what is shared with my friends. It seems Beacon could have been much better received if they were more transparent about how it works, and more proactive about giving users control over the updates from day 1.

Facebook finally decides to make Beacon an opt-in program rather than an opt-out program.

(continued from VAS Day 2 Summary)

More specifically, some of the main/reoccurring issues identified were:
-visual arts literacy (or visualcy, a termed being used by NAVA), especially compared to visual arts exposure
-educational standards and priorities for visual arts
-education not only in institutions, but also through artist-to-artist mentorships
-education at the K-12 level, both as integrated programs and specialized schools for the arts
-reaching a wider audience and allowing the general public to feel more comfortable in galleries and with art
-how can the arts community shift their thinking and practices to satisfy the public’s appetite for art
-the need for the arts sector to be recognized as having real financial weight
-how to build a stronger bond between the art being collected and the art being exhibited
-the need to document and publish catalogues and other materials on collections and exhibitions
-space issues when it comes to collecting and exhibiting
-financial constraints for collecting new works (Allan McKay of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery said that about 90% of newly acquired works, overall, are donations)
-how to make private collections and permanent collections more accessible (McKay here offered a more astounding estimate that 95% of a gallery’s collection is usually warehoused)
-engaging artists in the acquisition and exhibition process

There was also some discussion about the possibility of using new digital media as a possible solution for some of the issues of accessibility, education and preservation of works. Although these opportunities are very exciting, there is much yet to be discussed around the administration of these issues, and how much we really are reaching out. Alternative venues such as Facebook, Second Life or an independent website are great. But they are still inaccessible to the Canadians living in rural areas without an internet service to support the amount of information to be transmitted (if they have any access to internet services at all), and without careful planning we would soon end up having to rethink the issues again, or to need to convert everything to another format.

I also wonder, as did Jeffrey Matt, what other cultural industries face as issues of literacy and accessibility, and what they’re doing to address those challenges. Both composers of classical music and authors & writers certainly must face these issues to some degree–what are they doing about it?

I’m very curious to see what comes out of tomorrow’s discussions and closing remarks, and what will happen with all of this discourse after the conclusion of the Summit.