Opt-in/Opt-out: How to Add Shades of Gray

Update: See related CMO.com article The choice of opting in or out, as presented by many businesses to their customers, is a limiting one. Adding shades of gray to the options improves the likelihood that your customers will find one they like. Enlightened e-newsletters are already using this principle by allowing their readers to select from a list of different newsletters that target different aspects of the subject matter. Many of these...

Read More

Distribution Scope, Security, and Useful Tools

While working on the Facebook Privacy Informer App, I had to tackle the issue of “Scope of Distribution” of your personal information. Actually, this should be more properly named as “Scope of (Intended) Distribution”. Facebook privacy controls allow you to set the distribution of various aspects of your Facebook profile. In general, the controls allow you to set distribution to: (The inappropriately named) “Only...

Read More

Update: Recent Online Privacy Activity

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...

Read More

Pop-Psychology and Privacy

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...

Read More

Facebook Privacy Settings

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...

Read More