The Political Notebook: The One-Percentification of Higher Ed →
It’s graduation season in an economic downturn, so it’s time to reflect on the sorry state of college affordability, student loans and job prospects in the US. Being a twentysomething here in the US, I take discussions like these incredibly personally.
This afternoon I read this comment piece…
This commentary is spot on — the themes have been in place for quite some time, but it’s increasingly apparent as the recession continues to impact lower income students’ already-limited access to higher education.
Battles for Mexico's presidency are fought (and won) on Web 2.0 [via NY Times] →
“If you want to win a campaign you need to win every space of the terrain,” said Agustín Torres Ibarrola, a 34-year-old lawmaker who coordinates the digital strategy for Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of Mr. Calderón’s National Action Party, or PAN, who trails by double digits in the polls.
Mr. Torres was sitting beside a large screen displaying his TweetDeck page, which manages Twitter and Facebook accounts, as a handful of young campaign workers hunched over laptops monitoring social media sites and posting material related to a dispute with the campaign of the front-runner, Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
![theatlantic:
On Facebook, Your Privacy Is Your Friends’ Privacy
We tend to think about privacy in personal terms: my data, my personal information, my relationship with Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest. As our social networks grow and normalize, though, it’s increasingly more accurate to think about privacy as a communal affair, something heavily contextual and owned, collectively, by networks. Which means that privacy is something that all of us, as individuals and as a group, are responsible for.
Take Facebook. Aside from the standard, personalized privacy concerns — algorithms guessing your social security number, say, based on your profile information — there are also the concerns that expand with network effects. Photos, in particular, can reveal not only a user’s favorite places, vacation spots, and closest friends and family members, but also that same information for the other members of the user’s network. For those who have an interest, commercial or otherwise, in figuring out users’ identities and interests and overall persona on Facebook, your data can reveal your friends’ data — and vice versa.
Read more. [Image: João Paulo Pesce, Gustavo Rauber, Diego Las Casas, Virgílio Almeida]
I’m one chapter away from finishing “Connected” by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. They discuss, among other things, the idea of networks being entities in and of themselves — the homogeneity exhibited in networks (whether online or in real life) makes the individual players merely part of a larger stream of group patterns, decisions, and events. This article from The Atlantic identifies a potentially profitable exploitation of those connections.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m33o9k4Ilx1qcokc4o1_500.png)
On Facebook, Your Privacy Is Your Friends’ Privacy
We tend to think about privacy in personal terms: my data, my personal information, my relationship with Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest. As our social networks grow and normalize, though, it’s increasingly more accurate to think about privacy as a communal affair, something heavily contextual and owned, collectively, by networks. Which means that privacy is something that all of us, as individuals and as a group, are responsible for.
Take Facebook. Aside from the standard, personalized privacy concerns — algorithms guessing your social security number, say, based on your profile information — there are also the concerns that expand with network effects. Photos, in particular, can reveal not only a user’s favorite places, vacation spots, and closest friends and family members, but also that same information for the other members of the user’s network. For those who have an interest, commercial or otherwise, in figuring out users’ identities and interests and overall persona on Facebook, your data can reveal your friends’ data — and vice versa.
Read more. [Image: João Paulo Pesce, Gustavo Rauber, Diego Las Casas, Virgílio Almeida]
I’m one chapter away from finishing “Connected” by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. They discuss, among other things, the idea of networks being entities in and of themselves — the homogeneity exhibited in networks (whether online or in real life) makes the individual players merely part of a larger stream of group patterns, decisions, and events. This article from The Atlantic identifies a potentially profitable exploitation of those connections.
