The Wibble

Sometimes it seems like that. A week ago, Balachander Krishnamurthy came to Princeton and exposed even more reasons why we shouldn’t think anything we do on the Internet is private. He released a paper in August that shows how information in Online Social Networks (OSN, like Facebook, Livejournal) can leak personally identifiable information (PII) to third parties. What’s unnerving about his findings is that they mostly cover areas that people cannot take active measures to protect themselves, like Request-URIs.

The takeaway message: if you put the information on the Internet somewhere (like your real name on your Facebook profile), don’t be surprised if another party can link that information back to you. Most of this is out of your control and is based on how these websites and webapps are coded and designed. Opaque agreements between social networks and advertising companies are extremely unhelpful to end users in finding how their information is dealt with.

The quicker takeaway message: Don’t put anything on the Internet that you’re not okay with everyone knowing. This might include passing on participating in social networks for the truly paranoid.

Since WordPress’s default title for a new post is “Hello World!“–the title that I probably would have chosen–I felt the need to change it.  This is my obligatory explanatory post for why I’m adding my noise to the chaos of the Internet.  I figure, I like to write and sometimes spend time researching information that’s not organized that I think could be helpful to someone else.  Essentially, because I can.  This is a personal project and might even be a little fun and educational.

I have “blogged” twice before, once for class (WWS 586F: Information Technology and Public Policy instructed by the singularly awesome Ed Felten) and once for my internship at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).  Both experiences taught me two lessons:

1. blogging is easy
2. blogging is hard

Blogging is easy because it’s informal.  The audience isn’t going through my grammar participle by participle and there doesn’t need to be a formal structure.  It can be written in a conversational tone.

Blogging is hard because I’m putting myself out there.  My scariest classes at Princeton by far were my Creative Writing classes.  It was nerve-wracking for me to go to workshops and have ten other students and one (likely published and highly acclaimed) professor examine my writing paragraph by paragraph and critique it.  Computer Science is interesting because for the most part, people in the field are detached from their audience.  A programmer hardly sees their actual uses and computers talk, not people.  Writing is inherently intimate and revealing of the writer.  Not only is blogging as a form of writing revealing, it’s also putting that revealing information on the Internet for anyone to see and likely stored in some computer forever.

Both previous blogging adventures had clear goals in mind.  This one does not.  This is probably a mistake.  However, it’s my mistake, and my mistake it’ll be.  This will be interesting.