Mining social network data for personalisation and privacy concerns: A case study of Facebook’s Beacon

This is the post-print version of the final published paper that is available from the link below.The popular success of online social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook is a hugely tempting resource of data mining for businesses engaged in personalised marketing. The use of personal information, willingly shared between online friends' networks intuitively appears to be a natural extension of current advertising strategies such as word-of-mouth and viral marketing. However, the use of SNS data for personalised marketing has provoked outrage amongst SNS users and radically highlighted the issue of privacy concern. This paper inverts the traditional approach to personalisation by conceptualising the limits of data mining in social networks using privacy concern as the guide. A qualitative investigation of 95 blogs containing 568 comments was collected during the failed launch of Beacon, a third party marketing initiative by Facebook. Thematic analysis resulted in the development of taxonomy of privacy concerns which offers a concrete means for online businesses to better understand SNS business landscape - especially with regard to the limits of the use and acceptance of personalised marketing in social networks

Electronic Identity in Europe: Legal challenges and future perspectives (e-ID 2020)

This deliverable presents the work developed by the IPTS eID Team in 2012 on the large-encompassing topic of electronic identity. It is structured in four different parts: 1) eID: Relevance, Le-gal State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives; 2) Digital Natives and the Analysis of the Emerging Be-havioral Trends Regarding Privacy, Identity and Their Legal Implications; 3) The "prospective" use of social networking services for government eID in Europe; and 4) Facial Recognition, Privacy and Iden-tity in Online Social Networks.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Integrative advertising : the marketing 'dark side' or merely the emperor's new clothes?

This paper assesses the move towards more 'integrative advertising' methods which rely on the mixing of commercial and non-commercial content, and the suitability of the current EU legislative framework to deal with such developments. In essence, the paper examines the 'identification' and 'transparency' principles in the context of online advertising. This analysis allows for the drawing of conclusions vis-à-vis future policy initiatives and enforcement challenges. The paper states that for true advertising literacy mere identification of commercial communications is insufficient and that efforts need to be made in order to educate consumers (especially children) to allow for the continuing relevance and reliance on the notion of the average consumer

You\u27ll LOL @ This Tweet : Copyright Protection for Hashtag Gamers

Hashtag games combine the fun of quick, incongruous exchanges with the work of creative expression and do so online through microblogging, predominantly (if not exclusively) on Twitter. Currently, hashtag-game participants face two main obstacles to copyright protection for their fun expressions: the expressions\u27 brevity and Twitter\u27s terms of service. To protect the copyrights that Internet users acquire by participating in hashtag games, courts should focus on the creativity rather than the brevity of the resulting expressions. Furthermore, Congress should amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to prevent Internet service providers, like Twitter, from encroaching on users\u27 rights through broad licensing and sublicensing schemes in their terms of service. This Note will introduce hashtag games and argue for the copyright protection of short, humorous works such as expressions deriving from hashtag games. It will also provide an overview of microblogging and intellectual property rights by examining the terms of service of Twitter and other Internet service providers that enable microblogging and by considering internal and external limitations on the licensing schemes presented in such terms of service. Because Twitter\u27s terms lack sufficient internal limitations and the external limitations of offer and acceptance and unconscionability that contract law supplies do not suffice to protect users\u27 copyrights in the hashtag-game context, this Note will conclude that Congress should safeguard the rights of hashtag-game participants by amending the DCMA to prevent licensing schemes broader than necessary for the proper functioning of the Internet

Governing hate: Facebook and hate speech

This research investigates the relationship between Facebook and hate speech. In doing so, it deconstructs the governance structures of Facebook and analyses the principles and values that underpin Facebook’s schemes of intervention. This thesis argues that, from the perspective of Facebook, hate speech is approached less in terms of its substance and more in terms of a practical problem that needs to be resolved in an operational manner. They therefore conceive of relevant policy in terms of its fit within Facebook’s overall structure of governance, by which we mean the techniques or mechanisms used to internally order the various actors and actions. Theoretically, this thesis frames different approaches to hate speech regulation and adopts an understanding of governance as the means by which to regulate and order behaviours and actions, by using the work of Foucault and Miller and Rose to study governing systems. The research question concerns the ways (including the mechanisms, instruments, features and action sequences and above all the discourses) by which Facebook orders and regulates the creation and circulation of content when it comes to hate speech. The empirical materials upon which the thesis relied in order to identify the parameters of the governmentality of digital hate include: Mark Zuckerberg’s publications (May 2016 to November 2020), Facebook Principles and Values (2009 -2021), Facebook Community Standards (2016 2021), Content Standards (2018 2021), user’s settings (2016-2021), and the Oversight Board (2019-2021). To supplement these materials, the thesis makes use of three in depth interviews with Facebook’s Director of Public Policy, Campaigns and Programs (EMEA) Siobahn Cummiskey in 2016 and 2019 and with Facebook’s Public Policy officer Aibhinn Kelleher in 2017. Finally, the thesis makes use of secondary data that includes internal Facebook training materials for content moderators leaked to Pro-Republica and The Guardian. The key findings show that, while Facebook articulates its hate speech policies following a traditional liberal approach to hate speech, they operationationalise hateful content as a question of user safety. This results in an overall approach that is far removed from questions of social justice and emancipation. Instead, the focus is on procedural enforcement that produces more and more data. This emphasis on data, in turn, feeds into techno solutions relying on artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that are currently used moderately but which are planned as the preferred solution to what is constructed as a technical problem of content regulation

Against Notice Skepticism in Privacy (and Elsewhere)

What follows is an exploration of innovative new ways to deliver privacy notice. Unlike traditional notice that relies upon text or symbols to convey information, emerging strategies of “visceral” notice leverage a consumer’s very experience of a product or service to warn or inform. A regulation might require that a cell phone camera make a shutter sound so people know their photo is being taken. Or a law could incentivize websites to be more formal (as opposed to casual) wherever they collect personal information, as formality tends to place people on greater guard about what they disclose. The thesis of this Article is that, for a variety of reasons, experience as a form of privacy disclosure is worthy of further study before we give in to calls to abandon notice as a regulatory strategy in privacy and elsewhere. In Part I, the Article examines the promise of radical new forms of experiential or visceral notice based in contemporary design psychology. This Part also compares and contrasts visceral notice to other regulator strategies that seek to “nudge” or influence consumer or citizen behavior. Part II discusses why the further exploration of visceral notice and other notice innovation is warranted. Part III explores potential challenges to visceral notice—for instance, from the First Amendment—and lays out some thoughts on the best regulatory context for requiring or incentivizing visceral notice. In particular, this Part highlights the potential of safe harbors and goal-based rules, i.e., rules that look to the outcome of a notice strategy rather than dictate precisely how notice must be delivered. This Article uses online privacy as a case study for several reasons. First, notice is among the only affirmative obligations that companies face with respect to privacy—online privacy is a quintessential notice regime. Second, the Internet is a context in which notice is widely understood to have failed, but where the nature of digital services means that viable regulatory alternatives are few and poor. Finally, the fact that websites are entirely designed environments furnishes unique opportunities for the sorts of untraditional interventions explored in Part I