Robin Sage revisited

I recently blogged about a ComputerWorld interview with Tom Ryan who posed as cyber-hacking ingenue, Robin Sage, to see what kind of friends Robin could connect to in the intelligence business. This experiment, while unscientific, had the potential to reveal some interesting data points on how people connect, trust, and accept identities.

Accordingly, Mr. Ryan delivered his findings at the BlackHat conference a couple of weeks ago. My friends over at SecurityCurve posted a disappointed review of the talk.

It’s not that the discussion didn’t lay out how Tom Ryan did what he did – oh sure, there was plenty of that. He even had the woman whose picture he pilfered in attendance. But at the end of the day, the discussion was very heavy on the titillation factor: from the girl he exploited to the practitioner he embarrassed via their connection to a wife swapping site. But why do we care? So he tricked some people into friending him… And (surprise, surprise) Facebook and Twitter make it easy to link together various information about someone – that’s the point. So if you went into that talk wondering why you should care, you came out of it the same way.

It's really too bad Mr. Ryan didn't dig a bit deeper into the security ramifications of the ease in creating relationships on-line. BTW Diana at SecurityCurve told me that the name Robin Sage is likely to be a red flag for anyone trained in covert operations, which is probably why no one in the CIA or FBI accepted the friend request.

Still, despite the anemic analysis of the Robin Sage experiment, the issue still stands; what are the criteria that people use to make on-line connections and how deep does that trust go? Clearly Mr. Ryan experienced more than a cute face and a blue-chip pedigree gets you connected. His final comment in the CW interview points to the fact that it was Robin's contacts that got noticed:

Toward the end of the experiment, there was this massive influx of Arabs from overseas that were trying to get on the Robin page where all the military stuff was. I didn't really care for it. That was a bit scary.

Will the real Robin Sage please stand up?

"I had access to e-mail and bank accounts. I saw patterns in the kind of friends they had. The LinkedIn profiles would show patterns of new business relationships."

This is a quote from a ComputerWorld interview with Thomas Ryan, a security professional who created a fake persona to see how much information he could access via social networks. He stacked the deck by creating a young, cute, and highly intelligent woman, Robin Sage, and put her out on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The flirtatious cybergeek was able to make a few hundred friends in Intelligence and Government circles and gained access to sensitive information. It's an interesting lesson based on common sense: "The big takeaway is not to friend anybody unless you really know who they are." Like the recent Soviet Spy discovery, a cute face with a smarty pants background goes a long way in how we "trust" someone.

Fake femme fatale shows social network risks - Computerworld

Herre we go again...

Sigh, this is classic for anyone who's worried about data privacy when developing web-based apps. The WSJ reports today that:

The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.

Advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.

So if you click on an ad from your profile page, the referring URL is sent to the advertiser without being scrubbed. Looks like steps are being/have been taken by at least Facebook, but this is a rookie mistake. To ameliorate the sting of yet another Facebook privacy smack-down, other social networks are doing the same:

In addition to Facebook and MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5, Xanga and Digg also sent advertising companies the user name or ID number of the page being visited. (MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.) Twitter—which doesn't have ads on profile pages—also was found to pass Web addresses including user names of profiles being visited on Twitter.com when users clicked other links on the profiles.

And don' tell me advertisers armed with URL referrers back to user profile pages are making sure they are getting user's consent before looking at the profiles.

Facebook said its practices are now consistent with how advertising works across the Web. The company passes the "user ID of the page but not the person who clicked on the ad," the company spokesman said. "We don't consider this personally identifiable information and our policy does not allow advertisers to collect user information without the user's consent."

A URL referrer (i.e., user ID of the page) is a technicality; if it goes back to the user's profile page then it is a breach of a policy not to divulge personally identifiable information to 3rd parties.

I repeat myself, I'm glad all of this is happening. The social media is growing up and it's the consumers that are ensuring that things are getting safer out there. Apparently when experts expose security issues the fixes languish:

The sharing of users' personally identifiable data was first flagged in a paper by researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last August. The paper, which drew little attention at the time, evaluated practices at 12 social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and found multiple ways that outside companies could access user data.

I know it's hip to buck the established/academic technology world in social media tech circles, but sometimes these smarty-pants can actually help to prevent some embarrassing moments.

Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole - WSJ.com

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Seems that Facebook is the latest privacy poster-child highlighting the strains that come between a service provider seeking a way to cash-in on our desire to socialize and the responsibility the provider assumes to protect its users.

Recent blog posts and articles have recently come out on the (de)evolution of privacy on Facebook since 2005. Kurt Opsahl of the EFF provides an handy timeline of changes to Facebook's Terms of Service through the years. This posting prompted Matt McKeon at IBM Research's Center for Social Software to create a more specific timeline and interactive chart (click on image below for link to interactive chart and blog post).

Matt points out on his blog:

However, Facebook hasn't always managed its users' data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.

In a May 13th blog post, Ken Opsahl continues his coverage and urges Facebook to "follow its own Principles." According to Opsahl, Facebook's current privacy practices coupled with Elliot Scrage's (Facebook's VP for Public Policy) flippant responses in a recent NYT readers' question and answer piece, amount to a boatload of double-speak coming out of Palo Alto when it comes to user data privacy.

Social software wants to be open by nature. Which is crux of the current Facebook privacy kerfuffle. Without openness connections can't be made. However, with any social group there are implied rules for who can participate, what gets shared, and how. From a user's point of view, social wants to be open, but not that open.

A third party, who's purpose it is to facilitate, moderate, and monetize social activity, can be at odds to the purpose of the user. It is the third purpose of the service provider, making money, that creates the tailspin. Today Facebook takes the point of view that the act of registering for a Facebook account is implicit permission for Facebook to use any information a user posts for Facebooks own purposes (we're talking about making money here). Facebook is not just there to facilitate the connections that users want to make. After all, Facebook isn't free for Facebook.

If you look at Matt's interactive chart big changes happened between 2007 and 2009. Yea, I know a whole year, but I suspect 2008 would show some other interesting data, like jumps in numbers of users, increased numbers of applications, and even increased investment into Facebook. In other words Facebook's business changed and the opening up of user data provided the means for creating monetary value in Facebook.

Social networking has reached a tipping point where the "trust" levels are diminishing as usage rises. As more people and applications use the information we post in social networks, the more skittish we become. Not without reason, the rise in spam/malware attacks, bullying, "checking-up on" by employers/neighbors/creditors, and identity theft on social media is an indication of how valuable the social media dirt is to others. Of course users want more protections with consistent policies and experiences. But maybe we're gonna have to pay for that luxury.

Facebook Just Patented The Feed – What Does That Mean For Everyone That Uses Them?

How's this for timing?

Facebook in 2006 filed for a patent covering ‘the feed,’ as it is known among the tech world. That patent was just granted. Something to note, Facebook filed this before feeds were in vogue, before some social darlings were even born.

Next Web cites what the patent covers and has a link to the full patent. As the author points out, it remains to be seen what Facebook will do - likely something that involves royalties - but it's "probably going to get ugly."

How feeds are able to help people filter, sort, and keep up with multiple information channels is very timely. I recently linked to a Clay Shirky lecture on re-framing the information overload conundrum. Feeds seem to be part of the answer, witnessed by the recent launching of Google Buzz - despite it's not-ready-for-prime-time functionality. Considering these trends the timing of this patent award is uncanny.

I've found little commentary in the regular media but some bloggers have jumped in. All Facebook has some interesting details on the patent - that they are continuing to update - such as the patent does not include status feeds. I can hear the collective "Phew" coming from Twitter.

Facebook Just Patented The Feed – What Does That Mean For Everyone That Uses Them?