Tag Archives: privacy

June 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Checking Your Facebook Privacy (Again)

Last spring, I wrote a post outlining six steps for checking your Facebook privacy. These steps were developed during workshops that I had been teaching faculty and students at Emory on creating an academic web presence. While I (and most everyone here at ProfHacker) would suggest that sharing your work and being find-able on the web can have a salutory effect on your career (especially when you’re on the job market), not everyone feels that way–and especially about Facebook, where you likely have connected with friends and family who aren’t related to your daily work.

One of the tricky things about managing your Facebook privacy is that there are so many different choices to make. The service allows you granular control over almost everything you’re willing to share, but that also means you’re going have to make many, many choices. The other thing that is tricky about…

March 6, 2012, 11:00 am

Google Is Watching You …

By Amy Cavender

Google’s new privacy policy, which went into effect on March 1st, has been attracting a lot of attention. The Digital Campus crew mentioned it in their February 15 podcast, and there’s been a fair amount of discussion in the Chronicle about the degree to which the new policy will impact education partners and whether students’ privacy will be adequately protected (do be sure to read the short comment threads on some of those articles, as they provide some good points to think about). Enterprise users of Google services will apparently see relatively little impact.

Many of us who use Google services in our academic work, though, aren’t users of Google Apps for Education; we use the standard services instead. What do the changes to the privacy policy mean for us?

For myself personally, I don’t know that it’s going to make a great deal of difference in my daily work. As far as I can…

November 30, 2011, 8:00 am

Protecting Student Privacy Without Going FERPANUTS

By Amy Cavender

Back in November, Georgia Tech took down their wikis, claiming that they constituted a FERPA violation. This stirred up quite a discussion on Twitter, as well as on blogs and podcasts (see, for instance this and this).

Decisions such as the one taken by Georgia Tech are troubling, and undermine the kinds of work many readers of this blog do with their students. Nonetheless, student control of their work is important—especially when that work is (or may be) made public. Certainly there are ways (such as allowing students to use pseudonyms or to restrict access to their work, without taking it down) to meet legitimate student concerns, though, without backing away from having students present some of their work online, in public spaces.

So let’s hear from you, readers—what do you do to address students’ reasonable privacy concerns while continuing to ask them to work in…

November 23, 2011, 8:00 am

Protecting ‘Your’ Data

By Amy Cavender

The recent changes to Google Reader, which prompted last week’s post, call for more than a search for a new RSS reader. They’re a good occasion for us to think about “our” data, who controls it, and whether we’ll be able to maintain our own access to it.

Jason pointed us to a fine post in last week’s Weekend Reading: Steven Poole’s “Whatever Made You Think It Was Your Data Anyway?” Seriously, if you haven’t read it yet, have a look. Then go peruse Boone Gorges’ Project Reclaim, particularly his inaugural post.

To be sure, not everyone will be able or willing to take many of the measures that Boone’s implementing for himself. Still, we’d all do well to remember what Steven Poole points out in the post mentioned above: “If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow” (he calls it the “iron law of ‘free’ internet services”).

With that in…

August 25, 2011, 11:00 am

New Facebook Privacy Controls

By George Williams

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve done our best to keep up with the various Facebook privacy changes as they have taken place on our watch. Julie wrote two posts in 2009: “Managing Facebook Privacy Settings” and “Managing Facebook Privacy Settings (round 2).” Earlier this year, Brian provided us with “Six Steps for Checking Your Facebook Privacy.”

Facebook reports that it has over 750 million users, and–to put it mildly–that represents an enormous amount of information being shared online. Are you sure you know who gets to access the information you post? The social networking service hasn’t exactly been free from criticism over the choices it has made with regard to user privacy.

Well, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, Facebook has introduced a new set of what they say are easier-to-use controls for users’ privacy. Before, users had to click their way to a specific “Privacy…

July 28, 2011, 8:00 am

Use Collusion to Learn about Web Privacy

By Jason B. Jones

Cookies are small text files that websites store in your browser. Most of this is to facilitate things like shopping carts, or personalized settings for a site–for example, to identify subscribers to a news site, or commenters on a blog.

They are also routinely used to track what pages people visit, and in what order. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation of how this works:

1. If the user requests a page of the site, but the request contains no cookie, the server presumes that this is the first page visited by the user; the server creates a random string and sends it as a cookie back to the browser together with the requested page;
2. From this point on, the cookie will be automatically sent by the browser to the server every time a new page from the site is requested; the server sends the page as usual, but also stores the URL of …

April 20, 2011, 8:00 am

Privacy for Laptop Users

By George Williams

Whenever my students are doing in-class presentations, I take notes using my laptop about how they are doing. Later, I’ll use those notes to grade their performance and to provide them with some written feedback. Usually I’m sitting next to or in front of other students, though, and I’d rather not have those students looking over my thoughts about the presentation.

I’ve tried to make sure that I sit in such a way that others cannot see what I’m typing, but that’s not always possible. Fortunately, I recently saw a colleague using a laptop privacy screen: the person using the laptop can see what’s on the screen, but for anyone sitting to the left or the right the screen will appear black. Perfect. Such screens are more expensive than I would have predicted–$60 to cover a 15-inch screen–but if your budget allows, this is a great tool for keeping prying eyes off your work.

How about …