Klout is not illegal

To recap what we know about Internet privacy…

There has been quite a lot of talk in social media in recent days about Klout. This has been prompted in large part by an adjustment in Klout scores, which saw a huge drop in influence (10 points in my case). To a lesser extent, some [...]

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a meme

Many of us have been following with interest the adventures of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, better known as A Gay Girl in Damascus, a half Syrian, half American girl writing about her struggles in the Arab Spring. I have to admit that although I have read some of her entries, I was never [...]

Should we have any expectations of privacy in the Internet age?

I’ve been following with great interest (and a bit of amusement) the media saga taking place in the UK at the moment involving the naming of a footballer who allegedly had an extra-marital affair with a model. Perhaps some background is warranted to introduce this discussion. Imogen Thomas, a British reality TV personality, entered [...]

Negotiable privacy, or why I’m coming back to Facebook

Back in May 2009, I publicly quit Facebook in one of the most read and linked articles that I have written in this blog (apparently it still comes up quite high when people search for that topic). There is no need to go into a lot of detail into the reasons why I took [...]

The week Twitter became a liability

Twitter has been in the news quite a lot this last week here in the UK. First, we were presented with the Twitter Joke trial, where accountant Paul Chambers lost an appeal and was fined £2,000 GBP for posting a threatening message on Twitter, or more accurately, he posted a joke on Twitter and [...]

Is Firesheep illegal?

SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If you login to a social [...]

xkcd on password reuse

As one of the millions of people who reuses passwords, I found this xkcd utterly brilliant:

I wonder if it would be possible to program a web search that looks for the frequency of use of the words ‘xkcd’ and ‘brilliant’, ‘wonderful’, ‘utterly brilliant’, ‘amazing’ and ‘WTF?’ The results I suspect would be quite high.

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Blogging, anonymity and identity

As of today, I will semi-detach my personal and professional identity from the TechnoLlama online persona. This sounds more ominous than it actually is, what will happen is that I will remove my full name from the blog and my Twitter account, but will not hide who I am, will retain my list of publications [...]

Openness matters

As usual, Randall Munroe at xkcd gives us a terrific insight in the latest privacy developments:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. xkcd is a work of unadulterated genius.

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Can you quit Facebook?

I have been feeling quite smug in the last few days. That is, more smug than usual, a certain kind of cultivated perennial smugness is required if you are an academic, but I digress. My disproportionate sense of self-satisfaction comes from the fact that I quit Facebook one year ago. Going by the scandal unleashed [...]