Facebook Makes Your Privacy Difficult to Understand

There's a genius working at the New York Times graphics design center who produced the comprehensive visual (from which I happily pimped the above) of Facebook's 'bewildering tangle' of a privacy policy.

I'm generally trusting of all things Internets, including Google's all-seeing eye (well acquainted with the collective id), but it's not a bad thing to be a little standoffish in knowing that the privacy rules governing the web are largely unwritten, or rather, being written by the companies you use everyday on the Web (Google, Facebook, etc.). Your guardedness should arise from the fact that they are attempting to create a market-driven, self-interest supporting code of conduct that balances their business interest against the whip of torts. As with any pioneering enterprise, the law isn't yet advanced enough to cover this ground with prescriptive rules simply because the list of contingencies is branching and broadening everyday with no signs of slowing down or normalizing. So the shake-out of privacy protection will probably happen by dint of these companies being called-out in court for bad behavior, aka violations of your privacy. All I'm saying is be careful how much you share since Facebook is working mostly to capitalize on your personal information as their marketable data. This should bother you only so much as you have ignorantly shared compromising information. The upside is relevant advertising, the downside is martyrdom in the courts. As always, the ancient writ of caveat emptor applies.

In these instances, I like to fall back on the rhetorical utility of my run-in with the naive young coed Boobs McGee, whom I interviewed several years ago at a campus recruiting visit to an elite college in the Northeastern United States. Before the interview, I received a dossier on Ms. McGee (actual name forgotten to protect her identity, which, on second thought, why should I work harder to protect her identity than she does?) with her resume and cover letter.

Naturally, I Googled her and found her Facebook page entirely too-open to the public featuring a profile picture of her busting out of a slinky black dress with some frat-guy chomped down on the upper-middle camber of her cleavage. Whatever her name was, 'Boobs McGee' she instantly became and the jettison of respect only quickened when her self-reported 'interests' included 'My Tits' and 'Cocaine.'

After the interview, I consulted with the career services folks and let them know that Ms. McGee wasn't quite right for us but might be better-suited for one of the open (and far more lucrative) Tiger Woods' mistress roles. Additionally, her professional faux pas might be cited as a parable to all undergraduate job-seekers as to the dangers of over-sharing via Facebook.

Giving For Haiti

Looking around at the news cycles lately there's been plenty of bad news to get down about. I don't have to enumerate the various stories, but collectively it was starting to feel like nobody cares about the general wellbeing of each other - the whole humanity idea.

Then this earthquake in Haiti happened and this news is so bad, so devastating, it's off the scale as far as anything else we're dealing with that makes for 'tough times' in the United States. To put it in perspective, just 2,500 people died or went permanently missing after Hurricane Katrina. Early estimates from Port Au Prince are saying 100,000. This is unfathomably worse.

It's hard to be optimistic after so much destruction, but what's hopeful and encouraging about this is the growing sense of the international response. I gave money yesterday (Google makes it quite easy if you've got a Google Checkout account) to UNICEF and am anticipating the stories that reveal the scale of the international response. I hope to be pleasantly surprised by the scale of our empathy.

Pat Robertson was spouting off some nonsense yesterday about this earthquake being the Devil's collection on the deal the Haitians struck for freedom from slavery. While a sick and hateful thought, his initial observation is irrefutable, Haiti has had an incredibly tragic history.

Discovery posts an article with an insightful discourse on Haiti's overwhelming poverty as provided by University of Miami anthropology professor Bryan Page. This article had some illuminating points rooted in the colonial history of Haiti and it made me think (in light of Robertson's poison) that if anyone should be paying back Haiti for their suffering it should be the collective of the Western Tradition and not the Devil.

Here's our chance.

Google Real Time Search? Meh.

Watching the Top Chef Semi-Final last night with Jill, I wanted to get the word on this Bryan Voltaggio guy, who's said to have a restaurant in Maryland somewhere. Within striking distance of Philadelphia, I wondered, so I went to Google and had my first encounter with the heavily-hyped 'real time search.'

So it's early, and Google's got the whole reputation of releasing half-cooked products in beta, but I have to say I was expecting more than just an embedded Twitter Search feed.

Relevance being Google's goal, I have a hard time seeing how the real-time blather going on over at Twitter merits a higher ranked result than either the Top Chef site or Bryan Voltaggio's restaurant Volt (the result I clicked on). I would rank both of these as primary sources of more credibility than the voices of ignorami en masse, like @mandelicious85's 'Speculating that Bryan Voltaggio win's top chef.' This stuff is meaningless.

Fortunately, it appears Google may have anticipated a degree of time-sensitivity as determining factor for when the 'real time search' functionality appears in search results. Doing a little follow-up research this morning, now that the Bryan Voltaggio wind on Twitter has died down, the embedded feed didn't appear.

I suspect there's probably some threshold of activity that determines when real time feeds go on or off. This suggest that Google will learn something from their early experiments with this, and I hope they'll trip on someway to parse the noise and find better sources of real time relevance than rote Twitter feeds.

Panormous Returns!

This much is clear: the people want Panormous.

Blogging is funny stuff, or rather, search engine traffic is funny stuff. Back in December when Pizza Hut made the old new again and launched 'Panormous,' I sampled a bit and blogged on the results in my post triumphantly entitled 'Panormous!'

My blogging's my own business, so it was never my intention, but I attained the Holy Grail of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the coveted #1 organic ranking on Google for the term 'panormous.'

And my traffic went bananas:

Now, a few months later the value-proposition of Panormous (an enormous amount of dough for a modest amount of dough) remains undiminished and Pizza Hut relaunches the product, my Blog celebrates, reinvigorated with new spikes of traffic.

In web-marketing circles this is something of a coup, a resume builder, a feather in the SEO cap. If only I could recreate this kind of result on a useful keyword, it might not be a fluke and I'd be in business. I could probably cash in on the mere fact that I did it once and the promise of doing it again is worth plenty to the web's legions of arbitrage-minded carpetbaggers.

You've probably realized already that I don't actually sell Panormous or stand much to gain from the preponderance of panormous knowledge seekers hitting up my blog. Yet Google's algorithm, in it's determination of what's important to know in the world, sees my blog as a better resource on Panormous than Pizza Hut itself. In this day and age of omnipresent PR and finely controlled messaging and presentation, maybe Google's seeing through it. Maybe they're right because my stuff isn't marketing, but truth. The real word on Panormous.