Eastside Culture Crawl

Last night I had the great pleasure to meet a bunch of artists involved in the Eastside Culture Crawl to talk social media and how they might use these tools for promotion.

WendyD and the promotions/advertising board are already doing a good job maintaining a website and using twitter to connect the community to artists and the Crawl. Some of the artists are onboard with social media and self-promotion too, and are maintaining blogs and personal websites.

I had a good time and wanted to give a shout-out to the cool people I met last night. Obviously a group who work hard on creative pursuits, they brought great questions and an insight into what matters for artists.

Canadian Privacy Laws & Online Networking

A report form the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found that facebook breaches Canadian privacy law. The report responds to 24 complaints, and while most were unfounded or resolved there are four cases that are of concern.

Here's a bit from the executive summary (bolding by me):

On the remaining subjects of third-party applications, account deactivation and deletion, accounts of deceased users, and non-users’ personal information, the Assistant Commissioner likewise found Facebook to be in contravention of the Act and concluded that the allegations were well-founded. In these four cases, there remain unresolved issues where Facebook has not yet agreed to adopt her recommendations. Most notably, regarding third-party applications, the Assistant Commissioner determined that Facebook did not have adequate safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized access by application developers to users’ personal information, and furthermore was not doing enough to ensure that meaningful consent was obtained from individuals for the disclosure of their personal information to application developers.

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

It's something I rarely think about as I generally avoid apps, but it makes me wonder how many third-party applications are created just to harvest users' information.

CBC has a good quote from Jordan Plener, the UOttawa student who filed the complaint on behalf of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

"For a hangman application, for example, there is no use for the developer to know where the person lives or have their personal email address."

cbc.ca

That sounds on the money to me - but really, should we have any expectation of privacy at all on facebook? Our Minister Van Loan doesn't think so.

What do you think? Is it time we give up on protecting our personal information online?

Not to scare you or anything but...

Tom Hodgkinson at the Guardian did the digging and wrote up a very enlightening article about facebook. Here's my favourite part, but read the whole article. Mr. Hodgkinson is a great writer and journalist.

Facebook's
most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock
Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior
partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who
is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or
not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of
the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by
the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in
the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital
fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies
developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to
the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence
Community (IC) to further their missions".

With friends like these ... Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook | Technology | The Guardian

Not that I've got much to hide, I'm pretty much an open book and happy to present past and present mistakes to examination and ridicule, but WOW!

This is the first story of 2008 to make me rethink a large part of my life - the social networking & communications side.

Happy monday!

--note to CIA, Michael is not a terrorist or communist-sympathizer, he justs lists socialist as his political leanings on these social sites because he believes in public services over open-market solutions.

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