Lecture 2: Social Web Privacy & User Profiles (2012)

Social Web
Lecture 1I
What People DO on the Social Web?
Lora Aroyo
The Network Institute
VU University Amsterdam

Monday, February 27, 12

Cognitive surplus is the best thing since sliced bread.


Social
Relationships

Social in Physical World

• People have relationships within and across
different social contexts: family, sports,
work, friends
• In ‘real world’ this is okay, it works the way
it does, due to a relatively small set of social
contexts and interaction opportunities

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/SocialWebFrameworks2#Social_Graph_Management_Today


Social in Digital World
• Digital social dynamics match those in the
physical world: friends are friends in both worlds
• However, there are also signiﬁcant differences:
• # of people to interact with not limited by
distance or time
• a person can ‘block’ or ‘manage’ relationships
• personae subject to different social norms
• personae can evolve over time
• personae are less (not) limited in scope

Why Public Connections ...
serve as important identity signals
help people navigate the networked social world
serve to validate identity information about people


Multiple SN Accounts
• Users have many accounts on different social &
professional network services, e.g. personae for different
situations/contexts
• They utilize their different accounts in different ways,
depending on the digital context, e.g.:
• friendly chat on Facebook
• professional discussion on LinkedIn
• dating interactions on Hives
As a consequence there is a need to separate the systems to
manage the user's proﬁles, identities & permissions, as well as
their social graph (relationships) & their social media


Problems
• Maintaining a multitude of online profiles for different
contexts is cumbersome and time consuming - not
scalable
• It is difficult for new social networks to attract new &
maintain active members simply because of the effort
involved in creating and maintaining "yet-another-profile"
and re-establishing different aspects of your profile under
yet another context
• A user cannot control how their information is viewed
by others in different contexts by different social
applications


Architecture Needed
for managing multiple
Social Web proﬁles

“policy-oriented web”
architecture to support
trusted services in the
longer term


For example ...
• In one system manage your personal information:
• home address, telephone number, & best friends
• your Friends Profile gets exposed to Hives and Twitter
• In another system manage work-related information:
• office address, office telephone number, & work colleagues
• your Work Profile gets exposed to Plaxo and LinkedIn

• Another choice could be to store your entire profile locally with a
trusted third party, and then
• your Health Profile can be exposed to health care providers
• your Citizen Profile can be exposed to government services


Social Web User


Distributed Proﬁle


Social Graph


Social Groups


Frameworks


Personal
Proﬁles


Does the Social Web affect social interaction?


Opening the Sites


Opening the Sites
• Demand from application developers to make
use of the amounts of Social Web data &
make their applications available to the site
members
• Demand from users to reuse data and
connections they have already established on
other sites
• In response: Facebook provided an API &
Google OpenSocial API


• an open, decentralized standard for
authenticating users that can be used for
access control, allowing users to log on to
different services with the same digital
identity where these services trust the
authentication body
• making sure the users are who they say they are
• http://openid.net/

http://openidexplained.com/

OAuth
• an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a
standard method for web applications; it enables users
to grant third-party access to their web resources
without sharing their passwords
• largely based on: Flickr’s API Auth & Google’s AuthSub
• limitations in terms of complexity, user experience, scale
• 3 ﬂows merged into one: web-based apps, desktop
clients & mobile/limited devices; Facebook Connect -
ﬂows for web apps, mobile devices & game consoles
• http://oauth.net/


OAuth 2.0
• OAuth 2.0 focuses on client developer
simplicity - providing speciﬁc authorization
ﬂows for web & desktop applications, mobile
phones & living room devices
• not backwards compatible with previous
versions
• 6 New Flows
• http://oauth.net/2/

Twitter employing
OAuth

Figure credits: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/sachin_khosla062510.php3

Facebook Platform

• Graph API to read/write data into Facebook
• Authentication - interact with Graph API on
behalf of Facebook users (single-sign on
mechanism for web, mobile & desktop apps)
• Facebook Connect APIs - enable Facebook
members to log onto third-party websites,
applications, mobile devices & gaming
systems with their Facebook identity


OpenSocial
• Google initiative (set of APIs) based on open
standards JavaScript, HTML:
• People & Friends API (people and relationship information)

• Activities API (publishing & accessing user activity information)

• Persistence API (simple key-value pair data for server-free
stateful applications)

• So, with Open Social embedded in a site, a site
instantly becomes a social Web site
• integrated, e.g. OAuth, OAuth 2.0, Activity Streams,
• http://www.opensocial.org/

OpenSocial
• Half a year after Facebook Platform, Google
launched Open Social
• Popular containers: MySpace, Hi5, Plaxo,
LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster, Six Apart.
• Plugged-in applications: iLike, Slide, Flixter, Rock
You, etc.


Twitter APIs
• The Twitter platform offers access to the
data of more than 200 million tweets a day,
via different APIs
• Each API represents a facet of Twitter
• These APIs are constantly evolving, and
developers have to be aware of that
• http://dev.twitter.com

Twitter for Websites
• TfW: a set of products that enables
websites to easily integrate Twitter basic
functions
• Tweet button
• Follow button
• https://dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-for-
websites


Search API
• Dedicated API for running searches against the real-time index
of recent Tweets; to allow a user to query for Twitter content:
• a set of tweets with speciﬁc keywords,
• tweets referencing a speciﬁc user,
• tweets from a particular user
• to access to data around Trends
• it’s limited, e.g. index of only recent tweets (6-9 days); no
authentication: all queries are made anonymously; some tweets
& users may be missing from search results (focus on
relevance)


REST API
• the API for leveraging core Twitter objects
• enables developers to access some of the core primitives
of Twitter including timelines, status updates & user
information
• RESTful API calls to build a proﬁle of a user: user name,
user Twitter handle, user proﬁle avatar & the graph of people
that user is following on Twitter
• enables developers integration opportunities to interact
with Twitter: create & post tweets back to Twitter, reply to
tweets, favorite certain tweets, retweet other tweets, and more


Streaming API
• real-time sample of the Twitter Firehose
• for developers with data intensive needs, e.g. to build a data
mining product or do analytics research
• allows for large quantities of keywords to be speciﬁed and
tracked, retrieving geo-tagged tweets from a certain
region, or have the public statuses of a user set returned
• this requires to establish a long-lived HTTP connection and
maintain that connection
• if Search API is too much rate-limited, then move to
Streaming API


Streaming API Products
• Streaming API: public statuses from all users, ﬁltered in
various ways: by userid, keyword, geographic location
• User Streams: nearly all data required to update a user's
display. Requires the user's OAuth token. Provides public
and protected statuses from followings, direct messages,
mentions, and other events taken on and by the user. The
primary use case is providing updates to a Twitter client
• Site Streams: (in Beta) Once more than a handful of User
Streams connections are opened from the same host or
service, Site Streams must be used. The primary use case
is website and other service integrations


Issues related to User
Proﬁles & Networks


The Social Web is changing how our brains work.


A large part of what it means to be human, he writes, is our capacity for "deep
reading," an ability bestowed on us by Gutenberg's printing press, which
fostered an "intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration."

Yet Carr wants us to know what we're losing in exchange for our dynamic, interconnected, Internet-fueled world.The
Shallows is a rebuttal to those who unquestioningly accept a life in which information is unlimited, easily accessed but
fractured and unmoored from context, and where people are constantly online and multitasking among e-mail, Facebook
and websites. Extrapolating from the sagacity of Western philosophers like Plato and Marshall McLuhan and guided by
recent, pertinent discoveries in neuroscience, Carr argues that the Internet physically "rewires" our brain to where we end up
acting like computers — avaricious gobblers of information –- and our grip on what it means to be human slackens.


Privacy Concerns
• Legal still in its infancy, but courts do rule on new behavior
• fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution & legal
decisions concerning privacy are not equipped to address
social network sites
• e.g., do police ofﬁcers have the right to access content
posted to Facebook without a warrant?
• Truthfulness of personal proﬁles has become a subject of
debate
• Privacy hard to understand (few read Terms) and
misinterpret ‘Friends’


Security
• security of people (sex offenders)
• security of computers and data
• With enormous numbers of users and
enormous amounts of data, sites are
natural targets of spammers, and phishing
and malware attacks (‘new friend
malware’, ‘twitter spam’ etc.)


Bill of Rights
• Fundamental aspects to consider for users of Social Web:
• Ownership of their own personal information,
including:
• their own proﬁle data
• the list of people they are connected to
• the activity stream of content they create
• Control of whether & how personal information is
shared with others
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal
information to trusted external sites

http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/bill-of-rights/


http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/01/online-privacy

27-01-2012

“Having ﬁgured out how to
remember nearly everything, Issues:
it is about time people • burden on companies: it is next to
relearned how to forget” impossible to rid the web completely
of a piece of information: some
digital ripples will inevitably remain

“Personal data is the new oil • where one man’s data end and
another’s begin
of the internet and the new
currency of the digital • crooks may try to invoke it to have
their name struck from unfavorable
world.” online coverage
Meglena Kuneva, European
• it is not always clear what counts as
Consumer Commissioner, 2009 reporting on the internet


Privacy:
Awareness not Paranoia
"privacy paradox" = lack of awareness
of the public nature of Internet

ﬂexibility to handle friends with
different conceptions of privacy

ability to control data ﬂow inside and
outside network

realize that sensitive information can
be reconstructed


Current Public Initiatives
SOPA, PIPA, ACTA
• By media industry:
• AHRA 1992 - soft
• DMCA 1998 - surgical
• SOPA/PIPA 2011 - nuclear
• By non representatives
• ACTA - 39 countries


http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/27/twitter-isnt-censoring-you-your-government-is/

Would SOPA/ACTA change your behaviour on the Social Web?


Assignment 1

image source: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/

Hands-on Teaser
• Installations
• Python 2.6 or 2.7
• Python packages: json, facebook, uurllib2
• JavaScript Info Vis Toolkit (jit.zip)
• Facebook Developers app

• Experience OAuth
• Query the Facebook Open Graph
• Visualize your Facebook social network
in various ways
image source: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/

Lecture 2: Social Web Privacy &amp; User Profiles (2012)

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