This should be important to parents as they could be their child’s “friend” on Facebook, but still not see all the information the child is posting.  The best measure to to sit down and have your child log in and review their content with them for appropriateness.

You can see the video in it’s entirety right here.

Profile privacy settings

When you first create an account, Facebook takes some privileges with default settings. The number of options for each area is the daunting task that most newcomers to the service skip and forget to revisit later.

In the menu after logging in, select Settings – Privacy Settings.  You then get a simple view of 4 choices (that will become other parts as posts on here).  However, Profile privacy has 11 subsections to control.  They all (but one) follow the same dropdown choices:

• Everyone
• My Network and Friends
• Friends of Friends
• Only Friends
• Customize

Only Friends provides the most default privacy by allowing only users who are your confirmed friends to be able to view your profile.  Everything above that in the list gives more viewing rights to your profile information for every subcategory.

Friends of Friends expands yourself to allow the viewing of specific information to an expanded network through friends sharing.  This is the idea of community but starts to open your profile up to more people.  Imagine if you only have 10 friends but one of those 10 have 3000.

Of the 11 subsections in Profile, there is one called Profile also.  It is the control to decide who can see your actual profile page, and anything displayed on that page itself.  It is the key building block of controlling your information.  Basic Info includes your hometown and gender.  If you do not wish to disclose where you are but to make your profile open, then you can reduce this setting to only Friends so you can approve others first.

I mentioned the option for Customize in the list above.  Customize can open that setting to everyone on Facebook, Friends, Friends of Friends and specific networks to which you join and belong.  Lastly, some of the subsections allow you to block individuals by name.  A strong setting when issues such as cyber-bullying occur.

Lastly, one of the great features Facebook offers is often overlooked on the Profile privacy page.  The ability to type in any of your friends names to view your page as that person.  This is a quick and required way to verify the information you are presenting to anyone that is requesting to see your information.  You should randomly type in friends name to verify what is seen after changing settings.

In recent news, many children (I use this terms since we have to deal with underage issues) are facing charges when caught.  I went through about 15 articles and there was one common thread, the photos got shared far beyond the intended recipient by the resending of the photo to friends, showing the actual picture on the phone and alarmingly the number of school administrators that would see a photo once it was discovered.  Here is the scenario:

• Girl gets request or for fun sends picture of herself unclothed in some manner to a boy.
• Boy may or may not show his friends, but that can make a difference too
• Someone finds the picture on the boys phone.  This could be a parent or school administrator
• School administrator not only notifies parents on both sides, but the local police resource officer so many schools have
• Girl is charged with distributing child pornography
• Boy is charged with possessing child pornography

From January 2009:

This week, three teenage girls who allegedly sent nude or semi-nude cell phone pictures of themselves, and three male classmates in a western Pennsylvania high school who received them, are charged with child pornography.

I first asked myself, well how did they find out?  The answer was too obvious.  One of the children had turned on their cellphone during school hours, and got caught.

So who is at fault?  The sender for taking the picture.  Is a hormone driven teenager guilty of child pornography charges for pictures of herself?  I tend to say no since they are of herself and she willingly took them.  Is the recipient guilt of possession of child pornography?  If the recipient did not immediately delete the pictures I have to say yes.  Even though we are talking about a minor to a minor.  Sure, we can argue they didn’t know better.  We can’t argue that they were consenting, since they are minors right?  We have to agree that if the recipient kept the photos and never shared them with anyone, then they had what transgression?  It is such a gray area that you would hate to see someone get labeled for life as a sex offender for getting a picture on the cellphone.  Sharing the information with 200 friends might be a different matter that would have to be judged though.

From Mar 2009, we get a new jolt to the issue.  School administrators taking part in this same activity with students.  In this case it was a 17 year old female and a male administrator.  She had sent him photos of herself and at no time did he tell her to stop.  But the basic part was how they got each others cell phone numbers.  She was their babysitter.  So while we find out both of them have issues to deal with, the problem of sexting is not isolated to our kids today.

Summary: A new part of the ever growing technology is impacting how our kids interact.  Instead of judging each individual child, have we taught them what is proper etiquette when using the devices?  Do we regularly check their phones to see what is going on?  Do you have privacy issues with your kids?  Could you even discuss a topic like this with them?  Do you know where they send text messages to at all?  How about who they receive them from?  have you ever seen any content?

You sign up for NewSocialNetwork.  You are enjoying the site and it is growing at a nice rate, adding hundreds if not thousands of users daily.  Eventually they start to feel the growing pains and look for some cloud hosting of data.  Such as S3 from Amazon.  Here is where the trouble begins to surface.

Your original privacy agreement is with NewSocialNetwork, not S3.  Another agreement is reached independently between NewSocialNetwork and S3, not you and S3.  While in most instances these agreements are rahter benign, not all of them will be.

In the United States, information held by a company on your behalf — be it a bank, an e-mail provider or a social network — is often not protected as much as information a person keeps at home or a business stores in computers it owns. Sometimes that means that a government investigator, or even a lawyer in a civil lawsuit, can get access to records by simply using a subpoena rather than a search warrant, which requires more scrutiny by a court.

What the above means is that information, pictures, ideas and history of chats, email and browsing may be more freely available.  I am not saying I totally agree with this theory from the World Privacy Forum report.

Many of the social network sites reserve the right to change their Privacy documentation at will, with notice to you, the user.  However, this mostly happens as they make the change, not as they are about to.  What transpires is that you are already caught in new Privacy controls you did not originally agree to and had no notice amendments were coming.  You may lose or gain rights as these are modified.

While cloud services are looked upon as simply a data storage and distribution model for scalability, the key is that it includes our data storage.  Let us say that I remove my account from NewSocialNetwork following their Privacy rules.  Their rules state that they will delete all references to my account.  But what about the data and copies stored at the cloud location.  Are those removed by the cloud provider because of the NewSocialNetwork privacy terms?  Highly unlikely.

What I do know is that NewSocialNetwork (and all the ones we use today) need to amend their Privacy documentation available to us to address not only data we store with them directly on their servers, but through them once they start utilizing cloud services.

Where does the line get drawn between what you do in private and how it affects their view of you at the workspace?  Why would a rude comment on Facebook, made to the public, not anyone specifically generate interest from your employer?

The answers i the transparency of what used to be private.  You could hang around with your friends and family and have any discussion you wished.  If a co-worker was invited over (mainly a boss) the conversation was never the same tone or content.  You kept a definiteive line between both sides.  With the introduction of Facebook and other social network sites into the enterprise, the line is being slowly erased.

If your boss attempts to be your friend online, are you to say no?  How would that look to them?  Do you grudglinly accept their request and wonder why?  Is it an attempt to see more of who you are and your real attitudes or do they consider you a friend?

This all needs to be brought into perspective and you need to learn about the transparency of your lifestyle and presence as the two worlds merge like they never have before.  You are sharing data, locations, pictures and lifestyle with not only friends but your employers.

Let me focus on that issue for a moment.  While this is a major step by a social network of this size, who validates the birth year for anyone on any social network?  How many of you actually use your real birth year?  Yes, I am talking to you.  You know you do not.  Even the Attorney General of Connecticut, Roy Blumenthal, states he knows there is fake names/birthdays in this NY Times article:

Mr. Blumenthal said in a statement. “For every one of them, there may be hundreds of others using false names and ages.”

One of the facets of the online social networks is not the fear of using them.  It should be the responsibility of the person to secure their information that they intend to share.

It is admirable that the attorney generals of states are taking this stance, even working with Facebook now, but what about the ones that have alternate names or have not been caught?  That goes back to you, the public using the sites.  I get a lot of feedback from readers saying the sites should do more.  I agree and hope that we make a difference.  But it all has to start with the parents and your own ability to protect your information.

So make a visit to your kids friend list and even your own.  Take a new visit to the privacy section and see what you are sharing.  I am often surprised.  Then again I am not.

Earlier this week I noticed that one of my friends had made their Facebook profile photos no longer visible. I wasn’t sure if this was because they had put me on a restricted friend list or if they had simply removed their profile photos. I awkwardly asked my friend why I had been blocked from viewing his photos and he said that he blocked everybody so his boss wouldn’t see his less professional photographs. Unfortunately my friend didn’t understand the power of Facebook’s custom privacy settings.

Within a day or two, that same friend had been tagged in another photo which ultimately made it to my news feed.

I ran through this same scenario with our teenager daughter who decided it was time to have a Facebook account.  While you may protect your own photos from being seen, if someone tags (ie: says it is you when posting a photo) and we share the same common friend, then I will see the picture.  Point blank, no hiding it.

Where does this fit in SocialStalking?  Imagine this scenario a couple of ways.

1. Your boss happens to watch Facebook, or even a prospective employer.  They don’t see anything wrong with what you post and have checked you out quite often.  Then you attend a party when you were to be at work.  Or worse yet get caught in a compromising position during a picture.  That other person posts the pic and tags you.  Soon that picture you would have never posted ends up in a stream to be seen.  Your privacy features do not control that by default.
2. You are a young adult out at parties drinking before legal age.  You would never tell your parents this, but like a smart parent they watch your friends on Facebook also to get an idea of how your friends behave.  The friend posts a photo of you, tagged,  in a group of drinking teenagers.  This, of course, shows in the picture stream your parent see.

The example list goes on to include pictures of you somewhere you were never intended to be.  Inside of Facebook you should visit Settings – Privacy Settings  – News Feeds and Wall to control what you allow to be placed across the streams.

However, the current privacy settings in Facebook DO NOT ALLOW YOU TO CONTROL THIS.  So if you are caught in a photo and get tagged, the best you can do is remove that friend.  However, it is to late by then

P.S. I found a good safety refresher right here by Joi and another from Jun 08 right here

I think that the instrument used in the crime, in this case a computer, should not have been the focus of the crime itself.  I say that since the trial was moved to where the MySpace servers are located and treated as a computer case in the charges filed.

I believe that if you knowingly cause physical or emotional harm to someone that you also knew had current emotional issues, then the crime is apparent.  Missouri said they couldn’t prove that harassment was intended:

“Their purpose was never to cause her emotional harassment that we can prove,” Banas said. “There’s a difference between what people think or what we may believe the reason was that they created this, it’s what we can prove and what a jury would believe.”

This quote is from St. Charles County Prosecutor Jack Banas.  Maybe I am way off, but there was nothing but the attempt to cause this type of harm.  The whole purpose of the woman pretending to be a young boy and then dump a neighbor girl with a known emotional problem should be taken as humor?

The current Missouri law classifies the above as a class A misdemeanor unless done by someone over 21 years old against someone under 17 years old.  Then it becomes a felony charge.  Once again this meets the criteria if the state law had not been so old that it only included the telephone as electronic communication.

Each state, and federally, need to create laws to address the trends in social stalking, harassment and even squatting (which will be a post shortly).

Hopefully this quickly summarizes our thoughts on what happened and our thoughts are with the family and their loss.

MyChild by ReputationDefender scours the Internet for all references to your child or teen – by name, photography, screen name, or social network profiles – and packages it to you in an easy-to-understand report.

There is the first issue in that you can do this exact same ability yourself with simple tools like 123People right now.  They sell this service from $14.95/month to a 2-year plan for $238.80.  Wow!  All of this in a report that they then want you to purchase ‘Destroy” assistance for $29.95 if something is ever found about your kids you don’t like.

Listen here parents, pay close attention.  You cannot ever fully destroy it all once it shows up online due to all the social aggregators.  I don’t know how to make that any clearer.  If you have discovered your child has put inappropriate content out there, more than likely it is now cached, stored or shown in another online service that feeds from it (an aggregator)

The FAQ alone should scare you enough from paying money for such services.  They can’t guarantee to remove anything, they skate by the fact that their searches are basically the same as anyone else.

Now I am not saying that the people running the site are attempting to scam anyone, I am saying the cost associated to the service is since you can do this on your own for free.  There is no reason you cannot watch your child’s activities.  I will start making a list of some sites you can utilize instead to keep a constant flow of updates on their postings.