Cambridge researchers give privacy scores to social networking sites

Researchers from the Computer Laboratory’s Security Group at the University of Cambridge have just published the results of their privacy survey of 45 popular social networking (SN) sites from all over the world. The expertise and research findings of this group, led by Ross Anderson, has previously made headlines in the ZDnet, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Mirror and the Register, and has been shown on Newsnight.

More than 200 criteria related to privacy policies and privacy controls were used by Cambridge researchers to evaluate 45 SN sites. Examples of criteria include:

• the amount of data collected during sign up
• the default privacy settings
• whether information is routinely shared with third parties

SN sites have previously been criticised in the press for their privacy practices and so not surprisingly the academics found strong evidence that the SN market is not providing users with adequate privacy controls. However, the survey results also indicate a lot of variation in quality of SN sites. Bebo, LinkedIn and GaiaOnline were found to have the best privacy practices of all, while Badoo, CouchSurfing and MyLife were found to have the weakest. Arguably the most popular in the SN community, Facebook and MySpace, were found to have privacy controls of mediocre quality, but these two sites have also more features than other SN site and so it is harder to maintain their privacy. Furthermore, most sites were found to have very confusing and difficult to access privacy settings and among that cohort Facebook with its 61 privacy settings was the worst. Ironically, the survey found that sites that made privacy a selling point tended to have lower-quality privacy controls.

A major privacy problem with SN sites is they consistently hide accessible privacy information for users in order to reduce privacy salience for marketing purposes and instead advertise the benefits of disclosing personal data through connecting with friends, meeting new people and sharing pictures. However, the data also suggests that sites may have evolved specifically to communicate differently to users with different levels of privacy concern.

Overall, more popular SN sites have more resources to devote to the problem of privacy and they are more often scrutinised in the media over protection of user data than their less known counterparts and so their privacy controls are better maintained. Cambridge researchers believe that by revealing the privacy practices of all sites more pressure will be put on major sites to add further protections for users and less popular sites will also realise that good protection of their users’ data may lead to higher growth.

Facebook beats Google to top place

According to Hitwise, Facebook has now replaced Google as the top visited website in the United States for the week March 7th – 13th.

If you were unconvinced about the popularity and power of social networking, this one fact alone should convince you otherwise. This amazing trend is set to continue if the numbers are to be believed. Comparing the increase in Facebook visits year on year to those of Google, Facebook comes out on top with a whopping 185% increase in site visits. Google’s year on year increase seems insignificant in comparison at a modest 9%.

This new success for social networking follows on from last year’s triumph over personal email accounts. Social networking sites became the most popular way to send personal email, taking over from the likes of Yahoo! Gmail and Hotmail.

Social networking seminar attracts large audience

Kent House and Keele University Science and Business Park recently organised a joint seminar on social networking. The event, held on 9 September 09 at Keele Hall, was attended by nearly 100 delegates from all sectors of the local community – including small and large businesses, professional bodies, local authority, voluntary sector, and education.

The aims of the event were: to introduce social networking; to explain some of the jargon and issues around social media and social marketing; to suggest some of the opportunities offered by these new online channels for reaching people more effectively than is possible by traditional means; and to offer some examples of how social networking has been implemented locally.

The event was chaired by Rosi Monkman of Keele University Science and Business Park. The presenters were:

Kevin Holdridge, Managing Director, Kent House

A brief on what Social Networking is, how to get it right and avoid common pitfalls

Linda Jones, Managing Director, Passionate Media

An in-depth study on how to boost your business using social networking media

Hannah Hiles, Media and Communications Officer, Keele University

A case study on how social networking sites helped a business to engage with its customers

There is currently a lot of buzz as well as confusion around social networking, and this was reflected in the lively questions-and-answers session at the end of the presentations.

We have made available here the slides and video from the event.

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Slides – social networking presentations

The slides from the event are stored on Slideshare, and embedded here:

Video – social networking presentations

Click on any of the speakers’ names below to see video of their presentation.

Social networking sites keep ‘deleted’ photos

The security research group from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge have recently announced the results of their latest study on the deletion of personal photos from the social networking sites such as Facebook. Cambridge academics claim that user photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after 30 days or more since people have deleted them.

A Facebook spokesman claims that when a user deletes his or her photos from their profile, all those photos are removed from the company’s servers “immediately”. However, the Cambridge University team found quite the opposite. The research group performed an experiment during which they uploaded photos to a several social networking sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Google’s Picasa and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces. The academics then deleted those pictures from their online profiles, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites’ content delivery networks. When the researchers checked the URLs 30 days later, most of the links to photos continued to work even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed. As BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones puts it: “you may have put your pictures in Facebook’s bin, but you will still have to wait for the content delivery network to delete them”. Furthermore, special photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr and Google’s Picasa, did better than Facebook and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly.

It is not the first time that Facebook has breached user privacy as recently users of Facebook staged a revolt over rules which would have given the site permanent ownership of their data.

Joseph Bonneau, a lead researcher of this project, concludes that “social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what’s simpler rather than what is correct and it’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on”.

Kent House on Facebook

Just this week Kent House has gotten its very own Facebook page!

If you want to check out any upcoming events or become a fan of Kent House, why not pay us a visit.

As the page has just been set up this week, it is looking a little bare, so check it out, post a link to your site (always good for SEO!) and add a few comments!

You may notice if you visit the page that we have an event coming up in June, we will be sending out official invitations to over the coming months and you will be able to register online using our award winning EventManager event management system. However if you want to log your interest now, just send me a quick email and I will make sure you are on the invitation list.