I just helped fund Diaspora, an open-source, distributed approach to social networks

A Little More About The Project

21 APRIL 2010 by maxwell

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data.

A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.

Stay tuned for more updates on updates, and be sure to check out our Kickstarter!

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I thought there was some real potential here. I gave them a small amount of cash to help out, I think you should, too.

Posted via web from arvind's posterous

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook - incredible visualization

Matt McKeon's visualization of how Facebook's privacy rules have changed from 2005-today show how many more people potentially can see what you post. Scary, but fairly accurate if you read my post from last week about Facebook's privacy policy shift over time (in words, not pictures).

My webmaster forwarded this to me today. As a school that uses Facebook, this is something to make very clear to the students and adults in our community.

Posted via web from arvind's posterous

Whoah people, Discovery Educator Network has teamed up to score teachers free Prezi Pro accounts!

So, to kick things off with a bang, our friends at Prezi have very generously agreed to provide all STAR Discovery Educators with a free Educator Pro account for a year (normally $59).

All you have to do to get your free Educator Pro account from Prezi is visit this page on the new DEN online community website, log in and complete the form. 

I'm a big fan of Prezi and the Pro account is definitely worth it as it gives you the offline editor, which is key! I purchased mine a while ago, but I wanted to pass it along to my educator friends.

Posted via web from arvind's posterous

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy - is the end of Facebook near?

Commentary by Kurt Opsahl

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. ...

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information.

Related Issues: PrivacySocial NetworksTerms Of (Ab)Use

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via eff.org

An absolutely elegant document from the Electronic Frontier Foundation explaining how Facebook has continued to back out of their privacy policy with which they solicited users in the first place. It's spiraling to give them more data with which to sell, have people interact, and drive more use to their site.

I'm looking forward to major influencers writing publicly about dropping Facebook and a rash of new sites popping up in its place. I think there is real opportunity here for some entrepreneurs to think about the type of service people are looking for - walled gardens, sharing important memories/information with friends and family, keeping private data private (as much as it can be on the web), etc. Why not build a service that respects individual users? Is that possible? Or is it always about scaling your product as big as it can be?

As a side note: I think Flickr is a beautiful photo-sharing site where I can be public, private, for family, or for friends. Simple, effective. Can social networking sites like Facebook get back to what works?

Posted via web from arvind's posterous

The Changing Nature of Privacy on Facebook

As usual danah boyd hits it on the head while discussing how Facebook continually changes its privacy settings (in MIT Technology Review) without caring for how it affects users. Her example on page two of how this impacts teachers is particularly meaningful for me (and probably many of my readers).

Facebook has the opportunity to be responsible, a leader in how social networking companies ethically and morally protect their users' data, but in fact they've shown just the opposite - a sort of, 'your data is ours to get out there in whatever way we see fit.'

I'm hopeful that a new generation of companies/organizations will arise to challenge our understanding of privacy - the American Library Association has a wonderful resource called Privacy Revolution, in that spirit.

Posted via web from arvind's posterous