I was on a development death march for the weeks leading into the Internet Identity Workshop #13 (conference notes to be posted soon on the IIW website), but I succeeded and showed the Facebook Privacy Informer App at the conference. The goal of the Privacy Informer App is to analyze the inherent privacy risks associated with a particular website or online service. It then convolves the inherent risk metrics with how the viewer has configured...

For the last few weeks, I’ve been helping improve the web presence of a local business organization that  promotes the independent businesses of Hunterdon County, NJ. Check it out at HunterdonFirst.org. An interesting aspect of the website is that each business has the ability to edit their own page. A couple of businesses have taken advantage of this opportunity, and I’ll be working with more to build their own content and...

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a popular tool for many pop-psych discussions, also provides a useful framework for discussing privacy. The privacy concerns that I described in my previous post can be mapped to Maslow’s Hierarchy as: Will I be harmed? => Safety Will my property be damaged or taken? => Safety Will others think bad of me? => Esteem Will I be bothered by people trying to sell me stuff? => Self Actualization Let’s think...

I’m working through Facebook’s Privacy settings this morning as part of a new design and engineering project. Johnny Lang in the background singing “Good Morning Schoolgirl” seems very apropos. Have you taken the time to look through your Facebook settings lately? While I expected most of what I saw, what really struck me as weird were the permissions that may be allowed for friends-of-friends, and for the apps that...

Statz is the first website that tries to measure the somewhat abstract concept of “Privacy.” The measurement and analysis of privacy factors is surfaced in the Statz Privacy Score™, providing feedback on your entire data portfolio, and the Statz Privacy Meter™ that shows a graphic measurement of privacy disclosure for a single data source.