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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-02-19
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrcFmfQAZbg
what parts of your life do you consider to be private this is the story of how I discovered a phenomenon in the technology we use every day quietly changing your answer to that question last year I was one of the thousand lucky people accepted into Facebook summer engineering internship program as a computer science student at Harvard the story of how mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook was legendary
on our campus and getting the opportunity to work at his company was a dream for me to say the least I was excited to be working at a place that was described by the founder as a hacker culture where code wins arguments I figured that in the spirit of this hacker culture I could impress my future employers by writing some code to start discussion about a
feature on Facebook that I found a bit invasive and I thought other users might as well before this past summer Facebook messages app touched your location every message you sent from a mobile device by default so I figured that one out write some code to start discussion about this and possibly our uncover if this is an issue that was actually affecting users surprisingly I found that
by aggregating and plotting location in my classmates are showing through messenger on a map I could track them as they moved around Harvard now being a pretty big Harry potter fan I couldn't help but notice that this was eerily similar to one of Harry's magical tools called the Marauder's map which led Harry track his friends as they moved around Hogwarts so this inspired me to create
the chrome extension Marauder's map which users can download the map location data from their own messenger for in the spirit of cold winning arguments Marauder's map made the data feast was already sending to users more transparent and use that to ask location sharing feature was at all problematic I released the extension may alongside a blog post discussing why leaving sharing on by default may be an
issue as users may not be aware of the amount of sensitive data cause them to reveal overtime this was when things got wild so the week before I started my internship my blog post went viral as tens of thousands of people begin downloading marauders not to see for themselves what sort of data their friends are showing through messenger and of course it wasn't long until faith
got wind of this and reached out to me they told me to deactivate the extension which I did but more importantly the informant that location sharing default was gonna be vermouth for messenger I was ecstatic about this my coat actually create a change in a product used by hundreds of millions of people unfortunately the story did not end there turns out Facebook wasn't too happy about
this whole marauders not thing and I received a call the business did for was supposed to start my internship informing me that I no longer had a job there now I was extremely disheartened by this but I also thought it was a bit curious at this location sharing problem wasn't addressed earlier given that it'd been around even criticized for years I also wondered why would seem
like a reasonable discussion of feature struck such a nerve with Facebook so I began to look in Facebook's history privacy issues and started see a pattern emerge messages location sharing wasn't the first time default privacy settings caused a problem for the company in two thousand ten Facebook switch the default visibility of all posts on their site from friends only public pumping huge pushback from users which
eventually cause them to switch to fall back mark Zuckerberg responded to the incident by stating we decided sharing would be the social norm now and we just went for it now like most other social platforms Facebook's growth is driven in part by the idea of social proof if users join and use a site publicly other users will also join and use that site and it will
drive growth Facebook assumes that privacy is no longer a social norm they will try to make sharing as easy as possible and this will naturally nods users into sharing more and more enhanced drive insights growth and their profitability so Facebook actually isn't the only one where this sort of phenomenon happens in fact most growing social platforms have incentives designed they're sharing features in a way that
push you the sharing as much of their personal information as possible one of my favorite example of this is from the peer to peer payments app Venlo which is quickly become the most common way that college students are paying one another Venlo allows users to share their transactions with others on a new speed and of course the default is to publicly share all transactions so I
decided to write another chrome extension to aggregate these public transactions it's called money trail and it kind of was there to uncover what sort of things people were broadcast to the world due to this default the results were pretty surprising and kind of creepy for most users money trail show to their eating drinking a problem with at any given day it also uncovered with their best
friends roommates and significant others where additionally student organizations on campus across the country use them over things like dues and ticket sales allowing money trail generate a comprehensive list of their membership and track attendance their events Furthermore many student businesses such as our campus grill at Harvard except than the leading the track things like when my roommates are binging on greasy late night food which incidently
give me a pretty good idea of what to avoid the bathroom in my dorm so why do Venlo and other platforms cling to the sharing defaults spike their invasive consequences well as confirmed by van those head of growth sharing is their apps norm the social proof it provides help them grow because there hasn't been any public push back against the sharing norms in Venlo and other
social platforms they persist silently she be how readily you give up your personal information what I realized in doing projects like this is that even though people tend to take bribes for granted when using their apps rarely if ever checking their privacy settings are reading privacy policies they actually do care what information the apps are feeling about them so essentially the way apps are designed makes
it hard for us to actually get a handle on this any single piece of data such as a public them a payment or a one off geotagged message may not seem like a big deal but it's not always intuitive that when you add up the Strela data over time you can get some very invasive inside in an ideal world any apple shares your data with others
would come with a tool like money trailer marauders maps you can transparently see who knows what about you unfortunately this is probably never going to happen your data is a valuable asset and companies that are incentivized to grow their profitability and businesses in any way possible will leverage technology to make you share as much of that data as possible okay so traditionally in a case like
this one consumer and business interests are at odds the government steps in to advocate for the public and there has been some regulation to make it easier for users to get a sense of what apps revealing about them notably California's privacy protection act requires all companies have a clear privacy policy on their site describing what happens with user data unfortunately this has definitely not been sufficient
in a survey done last year by latinus we need the former chief technologist of the FTC hurting found that almost all of the top one hundred I was an android apps %HESITATION sharing a huge amount of user data directly with third parties would you ever get the game on your phone about cutting up fruit called fruit ninja was sharing your location and medically related search terms
from your device with strangers well among other things that's exactly what this team found and uncovering that this sort of data was being extracted from users by hundreds of different out required a lot more intensive work than simply reading the privacy ball well in the face of all this it may seem like a daunting task to get a handle on your privacy for most after still
one simple step you can take to better understand and limit your control spend a minute checking out the privacy settings near apps because I guarantee you they're going to be some box in there you wanna check unfortunately because the regulations around privacy protection are still in their infancy out permissions and privacy policies still aren't that useful effective privacy controls may not be included in your favorite
apps the reality is we are at a digital frontier a new of wild west and sometimes you have to take justice into your own hands we have seen time and again when people speak out against outs the don't respect their privacy things do change unfortunately right now people feel there's nothing they can do to stop abuses of their private data so they remain silent this is
a dangerous mentality because if we move forward showing indifference towards our privacy companies will continue to not just in the giving up more and more of our private lives now more than ever we need to watch your absence closely there watching us and share stories of privacy abuse what apps may not yet be beholden to regulation they are beholden to their users and we must realize
