To friend or not to

I don't mean to be paranoid here, but you better think twice before you become friend with someone in a social network.

It may be an undercover agent that you are accepting as a friend; this could lead to privacy violations if you are an innocent party.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

Want to know how they do it and what they can obtain? read up here.
I don't mind if they use social networks to uncover only those who did something wrong or really questionable, but it would be naive for me to think so.

Facebook's rules, for example, specify that users "will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission." Twitter's rules prohibit users from sending deceptive or false information. MySpace requires that information for accounts be "truthful and accurate."

I am confused now; can I prosecute an undercover agent on the above ground?

It may be someone impersonating someone else for totally different reason:

Around September 20, 2006, Lori Drew created the Myspace account for the "Josh Evans" alias. At the time Drew operated the Josh Evans MySpace account, she was aware that Meier had been taking antidepressant medication. Meier committed suicide as a result of the bullying.

It may be someone who tries to defame you by associating you with something that you are not. For example, tagging you in an image that is not socially acceptable or writing defamatory/incorrect remarks about you on your wall.


How do you know if a person is who he/she claims to be in a social network? Well, there's no formula for that. But it is in general a good idea to check the mutual friends a person has before accepting the request. It may not work in some cases. What if some of your friends have already been fooled to be friends with that person? (which I have encountered at least a few times already)

How privacy vanishes online and some thoughts

Very timely article:
"If a stranger came up to you, would you say your email address, your phone number?
If you have a not so close friend would you tell your DoB to him/her?
Probably not..yet people say it on the Internet."

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing: In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”

As the article also briefly mentions, you may think that innocuous attributes such as where you work, your current location, where and what you studied, etc. will not lead to identify you as a unique individual. However, there is research indicating that the aggregation of these small small things can lead to something powerful even to the extent to identify your social security number. Actually, one of my research goals is to minimize the revelation of use innocuous credentials used as part of access controlling in service consumption scenarios. In other words, the question is "how do I get the service with no or minimal disclosure of credentials yet convincing the service provider?"

Another question I am in search of answers is "how much privacy do I loose by revealing different bits of information in different places in the Internet?". Intuitively, as you reveal more attributes about you, you become easier to identify. How does this relationship vary - is your identifiability proportional to something about your attributes? Some attributes reveal more than others. My next question is about identifying that "something"; "Can we capture this notion in an information theoretic way?"

Google buzz is criticized for privacy concerns

After setting up buzz, if you don't change the default settings, others can see who you most frequently (not sure about the most frequent part, I guess they pick almost all the contacts that you ever had conversation with if your contact list is not too long) chat with or email to due to the default automatic friends feature. Looks like they have not learned from the Facebook beacon experience -- when it comes to information sharing it is safer to opt-in rather than opt-out.

The above link mentions that:
"Imagine ... a wife discovering that her husband emails and chats with an old girlfriend,"

(Btw, if you are honest, you probably don't need to hide anything. Are we encouraging people to be dishonest by allowing them to hide behind the screen in the name of privacy??)

Also mentions that:
"Imagine ... a boss discovers a subordinate emails with executives at a competitor."

(When you use a free service like Google mail/chat, you don't have much control over your information - your profile, your chat logs, your contacts, your emails ... this raises the question if we should use such services for business purposes or highly private matters??)

There could be other damaging inferences as well. For example, if Bob frequently communicate with one of his doctors, John, who specializes in cancer treatment. Others will be able to infer that Bob is possibly having some sort of cancer.

Mitigating factors:
There are some mitigating factors, however. Buzz only shares information about other people who are using Buzz and have set up public profiles in Google. So currently, most Gmail users are not publicly listed by the service. Users can also "unfollow" people who they don't want to be linked to.

You can follow the steps in this to change the default settings.