Facebook recently got caught hiring a PR firm to push stories about a Google social feature that Facebook thought was too deep an invasion of privacy.
The ploy backfired on the social networking giant and its PR firm.
Catch a flavor of the story with these posts (Getting Caught, Getting Caught Covering Up) from my fellow Epicenter writer, Sam Gustin.
Parents often think their teenage children will post anything to the web, and that it’s fair game for them to comment on their kid’s status messages. But teens have a different idea of what kind of public space Facebook actually is, according to new research from Microsoft.
In restaurants, people often dine close enough to overhear every conversation, but they pretend to not listen in. This act of ‘giving someone space’ is a gift of privacy. Goffman calls it ‘civil inattention.’
Civil inattention is a social norm, driven by an ideal of respect. Staring at someone or openly listening in on their conversations is a violation of social norms which makes people uneasy because it is experienced as an invasion of privacy. For teens, the same holds true online; they expect people – most notably, those who hold power over them – to respect their space.
That’s the one of the conclusions from Microsoft researchers Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick in their new paper (.pdf).
In December, Twitter received a court order from the Justice Department seeking details on users connected to Wikileaks, an order that came with a gag order forbidding the site from revealing the existence of the order.
Twitter fought that gag order and won the right to tell the account holders about the order, giving them the opportunity to quash it in court.
In today’s post for Wired.com, I propose that this become the standard for the tech industry:
Twitter briefly carried the torch for its users during that crucial period when, because of the gag order, its users couldn’t carry it themselves. The company’s action in asking for the gag order to be overturned sets a new precedent that we can only hope that other companies begin to follow.
The decision would be laudatory in almost any situation, and may even be unprecendented by a massive tech firm. The only other gag orders that I can think of that were challenged in court was one served on the Internet Archive, one on a small library, and another served on Nicholas Merrill, the president of the small NYC-based ISP Calyx Internet Access, who spent years resisting a National Security Letter order seeking information about one of his clients.
Even more remarkable, Twitter’s move comes as a litany of companies, including PayPal, Mastercard, VISA, and Bank of America, follow the political winds away from the First Amendment, banning donations to WikiLeaks. And Amazon.com voluntarily threw the site off its hosting platform, even though there’s nothing illegal in publishing classified documents. […]
Twitter deserves recognition for its principled upholding of the spirit of the First Amendment. It’s a shame that PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America and the U.S. government all failed — and continue to to fail — at their own versions of that test.
An oldie but goodie from May 26, 2010.
I was invited onto CNBC to talk about Facebook, and ended up fighting to get a word in with the raucous CNBC crew, who clearly have fun at their jobs.