Digital Stranger Danger

I’m no Annie Leibovitz, but I know my way around a camera and I make pretty good use of Flickr, one of the leading photo sharing sites on the Web.

As a sharing and networking platform, Flickr is pretty amazing. It’s a great source for feedback and inspiration on your photos – and I’ve even sold a few of my images. But every now and then, it’s a little disconcerting to realize how open all your images are to the reset of the world.

Flickr offers varying levels of privacy and copyright settings, but any fifth grader can figure out how to pull an otherwise “protected” image from the Internet. I’ve even pulled a few for work and school projects. But it wasn’t until Gothamist nabbed a photo of mine that it really hit home.

It really makes you think about what you post on the Web. Especially when it comes to friends, family and colleagues.

We’ve all heard about the hazards of posting photos of yourself from last night’s bender on Facebook. I think we all get the idea of erring on the side of prudence with that sort of thing.

But now as I get older and friends start to get married, I’m starting to see more and more friends posting innocent and sometimes painfully cute photos of their kids online. Thanks for sharing, but have you thought it through?

Yesterday, the New York Times explored the varying points of view on posting kids’ photos online. Mostly, they agreed on one thing – no bathtub photos – but that’s about it.

Many parents view issues of Web privacy are simply a modern reality that they need to accept and live with. One mom said “Hundreds of kids die in swimming pools every year, but we don’t shut down all the pools.”

Still others keep their kids on digital lock-down. A mother, so paranoid about privacy that she wouldn’t even give her name for the Times piece, recently caused an awkward situation with a friend who posted a picture of her son on Facebook.

Maybe there’s a happy medium between the total laissez-faire and witness protection approaches.

According to the Times: Regardless of what danger may come to your children by posting pictures, there is one hazard whose existence no one can question: other parents. And their wrath could be enough to make anyone think twice before posting photos of little Charlie’s fourth birthday party.

I think about my own four-year-old niece. She’s a photogenic little girl who already has a bigger digital footprint than many of my friends. Should we be worried about her online privacy? Maybe.

Are we over-thinking this a bit? According to some, we are. Via the Times:

Prof. David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, says TV shows like the “Dateline NBC” program, “To Catch a Predator,” have falsely inflated the danger of the Internet.

“Research shows that there is virtually no risk of pedophiles coming to get kids because they found them online,” said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute. While the debate makes this crime seem common, he said, all the talk is really just “techno-panic.”

My sense is there’s always going to be danger for kids, and it’s the parents’ responsibility to help navigate and educate according to what’s appropriate for the individual child. Looking back, there was always that one mom who couldn’t let their kid go to the mall without a chaperone – and that one who barely knew where their kid was. It’s the same here – just online.

I will not be a statistic! Um, unless theres's a discount ...

A few weeks ago, I posted about a recent study from UPenn and UC Berkley that found nearly 70 of Americans oppose being tracked online by advertisers – among other findings.

This past weekend, NPR’s “On the Media” featured a great interview Joseph Turow, lead author of the study and professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his conversation with Bob Garfield, Turow sums up his findings:

What the public is concerned about is that the pictures that advertisers draw about you are becoming more and more vivid, and whether or not they have pictures that you would agree with is a really big question. So I think the issue here is how much do people know about what’s going on, and do they have any control over it?

So, for example, if you get an ad, say, from NewYorkTimes.com and it’s tailored to you, it would be great if there were a way that you could know, a) that’s it tailored for you, b) where did they get those data from, c) how does it fit into a larger picture of you that that advertiser or that periodical has? And can you do anything about it?

But what people don’t realize is that advertisers have been doing this for years in the off-line world. Just look at the example of zoned newspaper editions. The NY Times sells a different version of the paper in the North East versus the Mid West. As Garfield points out, the digital world just amplifies the scope of what advertisers can do – analyzing the data “a batrillion ways.”

The funny thing though, is that supermarkets have more data on you than most websites according to Turow. It’s not just a loyalty play, but every time you use a discount card they grab a little more data about your purchase behavior in exchange for a few pennies. And as megastores grow in popularity, many more of us consolidate our shopping experience in one place. Now Wal-Mart can track how you buys groceries, clothing, prescriptions and even how you bank . But still we shop, swiping our club cards and dropping bits of data along the way.

Worth it? Maybe. Duane Reade gives me $5 back for every $100 I spend (which happens way too often). I’m OK if they know what kind of toothpaste I use as long as I get a little something out of the deal.

So the question we come back to is: How much is your privacy worth? A few cents off deodorant, a little extra browser functionality?

As we get savvier about online (and off-line) data collection, it’s a question we’re going to face more and more. For me, like any good communications person, my answer is “it depends.” It depends on how the data is collected – are they just taking it, or did they ask my permission? It depends on what it’s used for – obviously I know it’s used to market at me, but my data be given out? And it depends on what’s in it for me – don’t just take data from me, but give me something back.

Time will tell, but as we move further into the digital future people will become more savvy and less sensitive about data collection and what they allow be collected. We’ll see.

NYT: Medical Records No Safer than Movie Rental Info

What do Netflix and your health insurer have in common? More than you might think, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times.

For starters, both collect personal data about, like your name, address, phone number, credit information, payment history, purchase behavior and preferences.

And both strip personally identifiable information from these records, which are then sold to researchers and marketers to ultimately better understand and target you as a consumer.

While that may be a little creepy, it’s nothing out of the ordinary and totally legal. But, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, it is possible to re-identify individuals associated with the data based on otherwise innocuous information we all leave around the web – like chat logs, Twitter feeds, online comments and blogs.

Similar to a scam artist rummaging through your trash for bank statements you thought you destroyed, researchers say that your online footprint can aid in re-identifying information that is otherwise scrambled and scrubbed.

And while it might just be a little embarrassing for your Netflix history to get out (What do you mean you rented Another Gay Movie?), health records carry heavier implications and could cause irreparable “social, professional and financial harm,” according to the Times.

The scary thing is that there’s really nothing protecting the consumer at this point. If companies scramble and de-personalize your data, they’re in the clear to use it however they want. And it’s big business.

According to George Hill, an analyst at Leerink Swann, a health care investment bank, the clinical information market represents $8-10 billion in sales annually.

Yet while there are no safeguards to prevent reverse-identification of consumer data, the risk is evident.

According to the times: In 1997, for example, a researcher identified the medical records of William Weld, then the governor of Massachusetts, by correlating birthdays, ZIP codes and gender in voter registration rolls and information published by the state’s government insurance commission.

In the Times article, Dr. Deborah Peel, director of a Texas-based watchdog group, likened consumer risk to the Paris Hilton Sex Tape: “Once personal health data gets out there … it is going to be out there forever.”