Last Week In W3C Social Web

"Aleecia McDonald, co-chair, senior researcher at Mozilla, who are sponsoring my work as co-chair ..."

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:11:47 -0400

“

Aleecia McDonald, co-chair, senior researcher at Mozilla, who are sponsoring my work as co-chair

Thomas Roessler, the Tech & Society Domain Leader

Nick Doty, staff contact, and PhD student at UC Berkeley

”

- Tracking Protection Working Group Initial Teleconference — 14 Sep 2011

The Work on Tracking Protection from the Privacy Activity has started.

"Social Media Photo Metadata use Survey : CV Web Photo Metadata"

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:56:15 -0500

“Social Media Photo Metadata use Survey : CV Web Photo Metadata”

- Social Media Photo Metadata use Survey

"Workshop “The Web Social” - EGC 2010 - Hammamet, Tunisia - January 26, 2010 The workshop..."

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:01:03 -0500

“Workshop “The Web Social” - EGC 2010 - Hammamet, Tunisia - January 26, 2010 The workshop includes the following topics (but not limited to): * Knowledge discovery from social data; * Social networks (personal/professional) analysis; * Sociological phenomenon in the social Web; * Service providers and the social Web; * Semantic Web and the social Web; * Applications of social knowledge; * Content and services personalization; * Business models of the social Web; * Information retrieval and filtering in the social Web; * Social Web and mobility; * Community extraction and analysis; * Privacy in the social Web; * etc.”

- Workshop on the Web Social @ EGC 2010

The privacy box: a software proposal

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:38:45 -0500

Hartzog

“Privacy is conceived of as an interpersonal boundary process by which a person or group regulates interaction with others. By altering the degree of openness of the self to others, a hypothetical personal boundary is more or less receptive to social interaction with others. Privacy is, therefore, a dynamic process involving selective control over a self–boundary, either by an individual or by a group.”

"However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the..."

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:23:43 -0400

“However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the universe. If a dark user comments on a stream entry, I can see that comment. More importantly, I can see their user-ID, and I can generate a URL to a page that will contain their name. I can then watch for their activities elsewhere. Granted, I can’t directly search for their activity, but I can observe their effects on my friends. For want of a better term, I’ve been calling this “dark stalking”.”

- PJF’s Pages - Journal - Dark Stalking on Facebook

"And as a supplier that is providing these services, I can focus on what I am good at - my..."

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:44:46 -0400

“And as a supplier that is providing these services, I can focus on what I am good at - my comparative advantage - so that I can continue adding value to the people that use my offering.”

- Data portability and media: explaining the business case » By Elias Bizannes » DataPortability, business case

"In offering its free service to users,” Kelly told congress, “Facebook is dedicated to developing..."

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:53:04 -0400

““In offering its free service to users,” Kelly told congress, “Facebook is dedicated to developing advertising that is relevant and personal without invading users’ privacy, and to giving users more control over how their personal information is used in the online advertising environment.””

- Facebook Lobbies Washington on Privacy

"We have conducted the ﬁrst thorough analysis of the market for privacy practices and policies in..."

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 06:41:58 -0400

“We have conducted the ﬁrst thorough analysis of the market for privacy practices and policies
in online social networks. From an evaluation of 45 social networking sites using 260 criteria we
ﬁnd that many popular assumptions regarding privacy and social networking need to be revisited
when considering the entire ecosystem instead of only a handful of well-known sites. Contrary to
the common perception of an oligopolistic market, we ﬁnd evidence of vigorous competition for new
users. Despite observing many poor security practices, there is evidence that social network providers
are making efforts to implement privacy enhancing technologies with substantial diversity in the
amount of privacy control offered. However, privacy is rarely used as a selling point, even then only
as auxiliary, non-decisive feature. Sites also failed to promote their existing privacy controls within
the site. We similarly found great diversity in the length and content of formal privacy policies, but
found an opposite promotional trend: though almost all policies are not accessible to ordinary users
due to obfuscating legal jargon, they conspicuously vaunt the sites’ privacy practices. We conclude
that the market for privacy in social networks is dysfunctional in that there is signiﬁcant variation
in sites’ privacy controls, data collection requirements, and legal privacy policies, but this is not
effectively conveyed to users. Our empirical ﬁndings motivate us to introduce the novel model of a
privacy communication game, where the economically rational choice for a site operator is to make
privacy control available to evade criticism from privacy fundamentalists, while hiding the privacy
control interface and privacy policy to maximise sign-up numbers and encourage data sharing from
the pragmatic majority of users.”

- Joseph Bonneau, Sören Preibusch: The Privacy Jungle - Paper and Dataset

"Gamers want to see games that allow for interaction in a virtual world where they experience..."

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 16:11:55 -0400

“Gamers want to see games that allow for interaction in a virtual world where they experience everyday life through their customizable avatars. These games are considered a respite from real world monotony and pressures.”

- China SNS Gaming Applications: What’s Next? | CNReviews

vCard Format Specification at work

Wed, 27 May 2009 08:24:19 -0400

vCard Format Specification at work:

This is the change log on the new vcard format specification which is being actively edited.

"The point I wanted to make here is that, when “social data” transfers from one..."

Wed, 27 May 2009 08:08:21 -0400

“The point I wanted to make here is that, when “social data” transfers from one individual to another in a social network, even though these individuals have complied with the immediate privacy policy, there might be some other policy further up which they could be violating without them knowing. Oshani”

- Use Cases on Privacy and Context by Oshani Seneviratne on 2009-05-21 (public-xg-socialweb@w3.org from May 2009)

Scoping Presence

Wed, 27 May 2009 07:59:00 -0400

Try it yourself now… Identify a piece of technology you are working with or developing

What role, if any, does presence play?
What is its purpose?
What/who are the presentities?
What kind of presence information does it use?
How is it produced?
How is it consumed?
What is the balance of presence types?
How might it work differently using a different pattern of presence?

From the slides of Scott about Presence

Presence by Scott

Wed, 27 May 2009 07:56:28 -0400

Presence by Scott:

What is presence? How do we scope it?

Presence and Context

Wed, 27 May 2009 07:50:16 -0400

Presence and Context:

Presence, being present in a place, can be seen as a subset of context description. Some work has already been done in the past on that topic. Some specifications have been written such as SIMPLE at IETF or OPO.

Links around Social Web Privacy

Wed, 20 May 2009 10:13:44 -0400

Wiki User Stories around Social Web If you add more user stories to add, you could send an email to public-social-web-talk@w3.org
List of Discussions Topics for the Social Web XG
ZoneTag project used geo-tagged photos and social networks to do face detection
Lifelogging: Privacy and Empowerment with Memories for Life (pdf) by Kieron O’Hara, Mischa M. Tuffield and Nigel Shadbolt

The growth of information acquisition, storage and retrieval capacity has led to the development of the practice of lifelogging, the undiscriminating collection of information concerning one’s life and behaviour. There are potential problems in this practice, but equally it could be empowering for the individual, and provide a new locus for the construction of an online identity. In this paper we look at the technological possibilities and constraints for lifelogging tools, and set out some of the most important privacy, identity and empowerment-related issues. We argue that some of the privacy concerns are overblown, and that much research and commentary on lifelogging has made the unrealistic assumption that the information gathered is for private use, whereas, in a more socially-networked online world, much of it will have public functions and will be voluntarily released into the public domain.
Data Republishing on the Social Web (pdf) by Claudia Wagner and Enrico Motta

Data Republishing is a recent Social Web phenomenon which can be observed in diﬀerent areas of the Social Web. However, current Data Republishing tools don’t work in the emerging context of the Se- mantic Web. In particular, these tools neither generate any semantic metadata which provide information about the republished content (e.g., provenance information) nor are they able to make use of existing seman- tic metadata annotating the original content being republished. In this work we introduce the concept of Semantic Data Republishing and de- scribe how to implement it.
Collective Privacy Management in Social Networks (pdf) by Anna C. Squicciarini, Mohamed Shehab and Federica Paci

Social Networking is one of the major technological phe- nomena of the Web 2.0, with hundreds of millions of people participating. Social networks enable a form of self expres- sion for users, and help them to socialize and share content with other users. In spite of the fact that content sharing represents one of the prominent features of existing Social Network sites, Social Networks yet do not support any mech- anism for collaborative management of privacy settings for shared content. In this paper, we model the problem of collaborative enforcement of privacy policies on shared data by using game theory. In particular, we propose a solu- tion that offers automated ways to share images based on an extended notion of content ownership. Building upon the Clarke-Tax mechanism, we describe a simple mechanism that promotes truthfulness, and that rewards users who pro- mote co-ownership. We integrate our design with inference techniques that free the users from the burden of manually selecting privacy preferences for each picture. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time such a protection mechanism for Social Networking has been pro- posed. In the paper, we also show a proof-of-concept appli- cation, which we implemented in the context of Facebook, one of today’s most popular social networks. We show that supporting these type of solutions is not also feasible, but can be implemented through a minimal increase in overhead to end-users.

Lifestreams, the time of specs

Wed, 20 May 2009 08:17:41 -0400

Task Forces through User Stories

Christine Perey introduced the list of possible Task Forces for this Working Group. The task forces reflect people’s interests at the Social Web Barcelona Workshop. No specific task forces has been yet decided. The first effort will be to narrow the scopes of privacy, user experience, and distributed architecture through user stories.

List of Guest Speakers

To stay connected with the Social Web community, we decided to invite guest speakers. Harry Halpin proposed a first teleconference about the overlapping between FOAF and vCard. Please pick up a date among the proposed dates.

You’ve been invited to help sort out the “great” vCard in RDF and FOAF controversy, hopefully in order to get one useful RDF vocabulary that contains the basic core terms needed to describe people (call it “FOAF 2.0 - the vCard edition” if you will, although we may just have a new single version of vCard in RDF emerge as a module to be used with FOAF. Who knows?). We need to discuss what terms, solve any open issues, how to host, how to point old versions to a new version, and then how to outreach and communicate with the Portable Contacts and the current vCard IETF WG.

So many Lifestreams, OpenSocial and specifications

The Web has never been that social :)

Since March 2009, there is a group around Chris Messina in charge of developing an Activity Stream protocol for syndicating activities taken in social web applications and services, similar to those in Facebook’s stream or FriendFeed. The draft of “Atom Activity Base Schema” uses Atom as a base for the schema.

A similar effort has been going on in the Online Presence group. They are working on an Online Presence Ontology to provide the main concepts and properties required to describe information about user’s presence in the online world (e.g., on instant messaging platforms and Social Web sites).

OpenSocial is a community effort not driven by any company. There are discussions on the OpenSocial and Gadgets group.

Products, products, my life as a consumer

Flock 2.5 is being released.
Oversharing is the new trend. :)
Related to vCard and/or FOAF, twtBizCard, a new service for sending a business card through twitter.

General information

The second teleconferences has happened on May 13, 2009. Next one is today on May 20, 2009. You can follow the progress of the work on the Social Web XG weekly agenda. Trackbot will show you the open actions of the Working Group.

First week, a birth for Social Web Incubator Group

Wed, 13 May 2009 08:49:34 -0400

On January 15-16, W3C organized a workshop about Future of Social Networking in Barcelona, Spain. Participation was a success. 72 rich papers have been submitted. Read them, share them. A summary of the discussions (pdf version)of the Workshop is now available.

The Social Web Incubator Group has been created and started last week with its first teleconference on May 6, 2009. You can read the raw minutes or see the summary below. Incubator Activity at W3C is a way to foster and gather people quickly around the interests of a specific community.

Toby A Inkster created a planet social aggregating the news around Social Web activities at W3C and extended communities and also a group on identi.ca, the open source microblogging platform working with laconi.ca.

There is also an IRC channel, #swxg, on W3C IRC server (irc.w3.org:6665), a mailing list and a wiki for the group.

Around 30 persons participated to the first teleconference with very diverse communities, backgrounds and countries (China, UK, Canada, USA, France, etc.). A few decisions have been taken on how the group will operate.

A weekly 1 hour teleconference on Wednesday, 13:00-15:00Z
There will be 3 documents: Technical document, Use Case document, and a final report on the work of the Incubator Group.
To stay focus on things which are done in the community, there will be invited speakers who will introduce specific issues around their technologies and activities.

Some people volunteers for editing the documents, but no decision has been made yet on who will take the lead for each document. (guessed from IRC nicknames and by order from IRC)

Technical Document: Salvachua, Toby A Inkster, Karl Dubost
Use Case: Jeff Sonstein, Karl Dubost, Phil Archer, Fabien Gandon
Final Report: Christine Perey, Tim Anglade, Dan Brickley, Jed Sundwall, Fabien Gandon