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  • Privacy – The Online Generation Wants It

    CHICAGO (AP) — The generation that’s grown up posting their lives online wants a little privacy. That’s not what we might expect as we debate just how much access the government should have to our mobile and online lives.

    But as it turns out, young people are much more complex than some may think when determining what personal information they want to share.

    Sure, they’re as likely as ever to post photos of themselves online, as well as their location and even phone numbers — and assume that at least some of their information is shared among website providers — say those who track their high-tech habits. But as they approach adulthood, they’re also getting more adept at hiding and pruning their online lives.

    Despite their propensity for sharing, many young adults also are surprisingly big advocates for privacy — in some cases, more than their elders.

    That attitude showed up most recently in a poll done over the weekend for the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post. The poll, tied to the disclosure of broad federal surveillance, found that young adults were much more divided than older generations when asked if the government should tread on their privacy to thwart terrorism.

    Fifty-one percent of young adults, ages 18 to 29, said it was “more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy.”

    But 45 percent said personal privacy was more important, even if it limited the ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

    In contrast, less than a third of adults, age 30 and older, told pollsters that preserving personal privacy was more important, while about two-thirds placed higher value on permitting terror investigations, regardless of privacy infringement.

    The young adults were much more in line with their elders when asked about the government monitoring specific modes of communication. Pollsters found that a slight majority of adults — including 18- to 29-year-olds — said it was “acceptable” for the government to secretly obtain phone call records.

    But a similar slight majority also said it was “unacceptable” for the government to monitor everyone’s emails and online activity. In an AP-NORC Center survey conducted around the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, those younger than age 30 also were most likely to oppose several different means of government surveillance, from emails to phone calls.

    It should be noted that the details about surveillance techniques used by the National Security Agency were still emerging as the weekend Pew poll was being done.

    “The big insight here is that younger adults are not indifferent to privacy, as many seem to believe,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which is affiliated with Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

    It also fits with a report that Rainie’s staff recently issued on social media, privacy and adolescents, ages 12 to 17.

    They found that 91 percent of youth in that age bracket said they post photos of themselves on social networking sites, up from 79 percent in 2006, the last time this survey was done. Just over 70 percent post where they live, up from 61 percent. And 20 percent post their cell numbers, up from 2 percent.

    This time, researchers also asked about security and found that 60 percent of youth said they set their social networking profiles to private and were confident about keeping control of those settings. A similar proportion of young respondents said they’d also deleted some of their previous posts, blocked people from their social networking accounts and cloaked their messages with inside jokes or obscure references that only their friends would understand.

    Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and her colleagues call the latter habit “social steganography,” a term for the hidden messages that ancient Greeks used.

    But it’s not federal investigators young people have in mind when they write in code, she says.

    “While adults are often anxious about shared data that might be used by government agencies, advertisers, or evil older men, teens are much more attentive to those who hold immediate power over them — parents, teachers, college admissions officers, army recruiters, etc.,” Boyd wrote in an online blog about the Pew Internet & American Life findings.

    “Most teens aren’t worried about strangers,” she added, “They’re worried about getting in trouble (with those they know).”

    They’re also getting more serious about editing their online lives — and adding more privacy measures — as they enter the college and work worlds, says Mary Madden, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

    “They’ve had to learn to function in this world of constant monitoring,” says Madden, who co-wrote her organization’s report on young people and privacy.

    That includes parents who track their children’s mobile devices, computers and accounts. “So they crave the freedom to have a playful space where they can do that,” Madden says.

    It explains, in part, why teens are moving to more creative and visually driven sites, such as Instagram and Snapchat.

    Results from the most recent Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll, released Thursday but collected before the NSA story broke, found that young people were still more likely to accept the privacy tradeoffs of online life. Fifty-seven percent of young adults, ages 18 to 29, said they had a “great deal” of control over the personal information online. Even if there are risks, 54 percent also said the positives of online life made potential privacy tradeoffs worth it. Older age groups were consistently less likely to feel control over their online information and were less confident about the benefits of the tradeoffs.

    But they still want more control.

    A study published in 2010 by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania found that a large majority of young adults they questioned in 2009 thought there should be a law that would require website providers to delete all stored information about an individual.

    Those young people also wanted a law that would give them the right to know all the information those website providers have about them. Some would include government investigators, too.

    “I would highly prefer not having a target on my back for saying something in what I believe is a private forum,” says Jayson Flores, who’ll be a senior this year at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania.

    His views are consistent with the group that falls on the side of privacy over surveillance.

    Mandi Grandjean, a recent graduate of Miami University in Ohio, says she’s fine with the federal government doing secret surveillance of phone call records and Internet exchanges to combat terrorism, but “with congressional oversight.”

    “I was in sixth grade when 9/11 happened — and the world changed,” she says. “I am personally not a fan of big government, but I understand there are needs for security.”

    But even she believes it’s different when it comes to an employer, or even a coach. She was an athlete at Miami and had to agree to have her social networking accounts — even private ones — monitored by her coaches.

    She recalls one time, when she tweeted something on her locked Twitter account at midnight. Shortly after, her coach texted her: “Go to bed.”

    “I think there’s a line,” Grandjean says. “It puts me on edge.. It’s a little too close for comfort.”

    The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone June 6-9 with a random sample of 1,004 adults, age 18 and older. The margin of error is plus-or-minus 3.7 percentage points.

    The Pew Internet & American Life Project privacy poll, completed last September, tallied responses from 802 young people, ages 12 to 17, and their parents. It has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.5 percentage points.

    The Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll was conducted by phone from May 29 – June 2 with 1,000 American adults age 18 and older. The margin of error is plus-or-minus 3.1 percentage points.

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    On the Internet: Pew Research Center

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    Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine@ap.org or at

  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Reddit, Twitter, and the Hunt for the Wrong Man

    By  posted at 6:00 am on April 23, 2013

    Thursday night’s abhorrent online vigilantism — in which Reddit and Twitter users seized upon police radio chatter to accuse a missing (and completely innocent) Brown University student of bombing the Boston Marathon — reminded us of one of the most under-acknowledged facts of the internet: that beyond the sleek, profitable edifices of Web 2.0 there remains the humming, virtual presence of an online crowd that is restive, unpredictable, and hungry for a cause.

    One need only glance at a few of the threads from Thursday night to get a sense of the zeal, numbers, and unscrupulousness of the throngs that intercepted two misidentified names and promptly set about defaming one. As with any physical crowd, what began as isolated innuendo quickly became the rallying cry of thousands. At midnight, Anonymous tweeted the full names of two possible suspects mentioned by the police — one of them the missing student, Sunil Tripathi — but omitted the all-important modifier “possible.”  By morning, the post had been retweeted over 3,000 times, and it was not until the police confirmed the identities of the actual suspects, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, that the crowd’s furor over Tripathi subsided.

    I first learned of the night’s disturbing events the following morning, when a friend called to warn me that Sunil Tripathi had been the victim of an online smear campaign. A year and a half ago I had visited this friend in Providence, and on the way there I happened to share a ride with Sunil and another Brown student. I had not met him before or since, and I did not know he was missing. My thoughts immediately went out to his family and friends, though soon I was also checking Reddit and Twitter to see the damage for myself. What I found were the digital debris of an internet lynch mob — incendiary posts, hastily produced collages of Tripathi’s face next to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s, some comments that had since been deleted, some that had been redacted to note that he was not, in fact, their man.

    It’s a bit unfashionable to speak darkly of “the crowd” these days. One might think that the term itself betrays a certain elitism or establishmentarianism, and yet the odd state of affairs is that it is precisely the establishment — generally business and mainstream media — that has recently embraced the power and resourcefulness of the online multitudes. In the past decade, much has been made of the untapped energy of online crowds, of their wisdom, ingenuity, and potential for productivity. Search Amazon and you will find, apart from James Surowiecki’s inaugural 2004 discussion The Wisdom of Crowds, titles like Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business and We Are Smarter than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business.

    Click here to read the full article

    source: The Millions

  • Anyone Can Be Found on Social Media in 12 Hours

    The Physics arXiv Blog for MIT Technology Review

    In 1967, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram sent out 160 packages to randomly chosen individuals in the U.S., asking them to forward them to a single individual living in Boston. The task included a simple rule: The recipients could only send each parcel on to somebody they knew on a first-name basis.

    To his surprise, Milgram found that the first package arrived at its destination via only two people. On average, he found that the parcels reached their destination via five pairs of hands, which amounts to 6 degrees of separation.

    Milgram’s work has since been repeated on various social networks. For example, Microsoft says people on its Messenger network are separated by 6.6 degrees of freedom and Facebook claims its members are separated by only 4 degrees of separation.

    But there is another element to this work that has been less closely studied, which is the time it takes to travel across a network. In Milgram’s experiment, the first package arrived in just four days. But the others took significantly longer.

    So an interesting question is how quickly is it possible to traverse a social network — to track down a random individual across the network.

    Today, we have an answer thanks to the work of Alex Rutherford at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and a few pals who have measured how quickly it is possible to track down random individuals around the world using social networks.

    They concluded that, on average, any individual is just 12 hours of separation from another.

    Their data comes from a competition called the Tag Challenge, in which the goal was to find five individuals in five different cities in North America and Europe. The only clue was a mugshot of the individual, the name of the city he or she was in and the fact that they would be wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the event.

    Rutherford and his team won the competition by identifying three of the five individuals in just 12 hours.

    They say a key factor to achieving this feat was the ability of participants to target other individuals who may be to help. That’s in contrast to another strategy which is blindly gathering as many different people to help as possible.

    Click here to read the full article

    source: Mashable

  • Warning over child ‘addiction’ to smartphones and gaming devices

    BY NICOLA ANDERSON – 23 APRIL 2013

    More young children are showing signs of becoming “addicted” to gadgets such as smartphones and gaming devices, psychologists have warned.

    Children are having problems concentrating in school and have motor skills worryingly below their appropriate age because they are spending “hours” playing computer games each day.

    One professional recently treated a 10-year-old who had gashes on his knuckles after lashing out in his sleep as a result of becoming agitated and aggressive after hours of playing the violent 18-rated ‘Grand Theft Auto’.

    Educational psychologist Dr Catriona Martyn, who is based in Dunmore, Co Galway, said there were also concerns about concentration levels in school but parents are often surprised when it is linked with the use of gadgets.

    Educational psychologist Anne Staunton warned that research had to begin “sooner rather than later”, saying she had noticed evidence among schoolchildren that gaming and playing on devices “can become an addiction”.

    This comes as research in the Britain reveals how young technology addicts experience the same withdrawal symptoms as alcoholics or heroin addicts when the devices are taken away.

    A technology addiction programme was set up three years ago by Dr Richard Graham, of the Capio Nightingale clinic in London, who said the condition prevented young people from forming normal social relationships, leaving them drained by the constant interaction.

    source: Belfast Telegraph

  • Research finds that video games hold both risks and rewards for children with Autism

    By  — April 22, 2013

    One in 88 children in America have a disorder that falls somewhere on the Autism Spectrum according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These range from conditions like the high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome to pervasive developmental disorders. With autism diagnoses rising at an incredible rate in recent decades, it’s been more important than ever to identify effective methods for helping to educate and socialize those with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Based on new research conducted at the School of Health Professions at the University of Missouri’s Thompson Center, video games could be a powerful tool in reaching children diagnosed with an ASD – but the data so far compiled demonstrates that games also carry some risks.

    Assistant professor Micah Mazurek recently conducted a study of 202 children diagnosed with ASD alongside 179 of their respective siblings to determine which types of screen-based media (television, video games, other computer software, and web-based entertainment) they respond to. Mazurek observed a demonstrable link between children with ASD and games.

    “We found that children with ASD spent more time playing video games than typically developing children, and they are much more likely to develop problematic or addictive patterns of video game play,” said Dr. Mazurek.

    “Using screen-based technologies, communication, and social skills could be taught and reinforced right away. However, more research is needed to determine whether the skills children with ASD might learn in virtual reality environments would translate into actual social interactions.”

    The primary conclusion of Mazurek’s most recent study is that there is a need for more study into how those with ASD interact with video games, and what social skills they take away from gaming. As obsessive behavior is a common characteristic of ASD, children with disorders are also possibly more susceptible to game addiction. “Parents need to be aware that, although video games are especially reinforcing for children with ASD, children with ASD may also have problems disengaging from these games.”

    As detailed in a new report by National Public Radio’s Lauren Silverman though, video games can be an important outlet for those with ASD even after childhood. “[Those with ASD} may really flourish at engineering-type tasks or computer design, where their interaction with people is somewhat limited,” says Dr. Patricia Evans of Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. It’s because of that propensity that Gary Moore and Dan Sellic opened the nonParelli Institute, an educational institute and software company that exclusively works with ASD employees.

    source: DIGITAL TRENDS 

     

  • 5 Ways Teenagers are the New ‘Mobile-First’ Generation

    It’s always a useful task to put some perspective onto the rate of technological change over the last decade or two.

    I have talked about Generation Y and the millenials in an earlier post, with the video of the toddler using an iPad with ease, but being dumbfounded by a magazine, illustrating perfectly how the children of the internet age are true digital natives.

    What’s really interesting to look into is the way the new ‘totally mobile’ generation are using the internet, social media and connectivity in different ways to the rest of us.

    Just this month the Pew Research Centre released a new study into smartphone adoption among American teens. One of the key findings was how a quarter of teenagers from the study are now ‘mobile-mostly’ internet users, with their smartphone the primary way of going online versus a desktop PC or laptop.

    The survey looked at technology use among 802 12-17 year olds and their parents. Here are five key findings from the study.

    1. 78% of all teens now have a mobile phone (up from just 45% in 2004).
    2. 37% of all teens have smartphones (up from just 23% in 2011).
    3. 23% of teens have a tablet computer, a level comparable to the general adult population.
    4. 95% of teens use the internet.
    5. 74% teens ages 12-17 say they access the internet on mobile phones, tablets, and other mobile devices at least occasionally.

    The statistics also reveal how the ‘totally mobile’ generation use their devices to create content (photos and video) and share more widely across social media. It’s also worth noting how little teens use voice relative to text and internet services to communicate with each other. Here’s the full breakdown from Pew of what teens use their mobiles for.

    • 83% take pictures.
    • 64% share pictures with others.
    • 60% play music.
    • 46% play games.
    • 32% swap videos.
    • 31% exchange instant messages.
    • 23% access social networks.
    • 21% use email.
    • 11% purchase things.

    These figures are based on studies of US teenagers but many of these trends will be similar to teens in Western Europe and other developed parts of the world. As Mary Madden, senior research for the Pew Research Centre’s Internet Project concludes: “In many ways, teens represent the leading edge of mobile connectivity, and the patterns of their technology use often signal future changes in the adult population.”

    The challenge for the future is to ensure that users are fully educated about how to run their mobile lives safely and responsibly, and that there are the necessary measures in place to ensure safety without shackling creativity and opportunity.

    I’ll leave you with some interesting food for thought for future discussion. These statistics only cover the US but last year one in five of the world’s mobile phone owning youth lived in India.

    I’d love to hear any other statistics or anecdotes about the evolution of this ‘totally mobile’ generation and the future impact.

    Photo credit wrangler / Shutterstock

    source: Linkedin

  • Study: Google Searches Reveal Mental Health Patterns

    Search terms implied that people are 24 percent less likely to consider suicide in the summer, among other seasonal fluctuations that may be useful in epidemiology for illnesses that are difficult to track.

    LINDSAY ABRAMS APR 9 2013, 8:21 AM ET

    PROBLEM: Google overhyped the flu this year, which seemed to be a blow to the company’s claim that it can track disease in real-time. Not to mention, the CDC was doing a fine job monitoring the virus’s spread without the help of Google’s search-based analysis. Traditional epidemiological surveillance techniques are less reliable, though, when it comes to mental illness, which remains complex and stigmatized enough that there’s reason to believe people may be more comfortable consulting the Internet than their doctors.

    METHODOLOGY: Public health experts at San Diego State looked at every mental health query made on Google between 2006 and 2010 in the U.S. and Australia. They identified searches that used “language suggestive of mental health matters,”  which usually involved people either attempting to self-diagnose or treat themselves, or looking up information on behalf of a friend or family member. When it comes to ones skin, they should be aware of what needs to done in case of a fibromyalgia rash.

    The researchers specifically analyzed this data in terms of seasonal changes: shorter, darker days are known to increase symptoms of depression, but little is known about possible patterns for other mental illnesses. They adjusted for big news stories, to avoid the effects of media hype like that which caused Google to suggest that the flu was more widespread than it actually was.

    RESULTS: In the U.S., inquiries about mental health dropped by 14 percent from winter to summer. The seasonal differences, for major mental illnesses, were as follows:

    • Eating disorders: 37%
    • Schizophrenia: 37%
    • Bipolar: 16%
    • ADHD: 28%
    • OCD: 18%
    • Suicide: 24%
    • Anxiety: 7%

    Similar drops were seen in the Australian dataset. In fact, peaks and troughs in search volume between the two countries closely reflected one another — while Americans enjoyed the decline in mental illness that appeared to come with lengthening days and warmer weather, the Australian winter signaled a rise in the very same:

    Seasonal change in Google searches in the U.S. (blue) and Australia (red)

    IMPLICATIONS: “We can figuratively look inside the heads of searchers to understand population mental health patterns” by analyzing Google searches, said lead researcher John Ayers in a statement. There are obvious limits to this supposed omniscience: it doesn’t allow us to zero in on any specific demographics, and even if more people were searching for “OCD symptoms,” “OCD tests,” and “medications for OCD,” there’s no way of confirming that those the trends correspond to actual, diagnosable cases of OCD. The data also doesn’t help us to understand why these seasonal patterns exist. But it’s the very least, as the authors write, “a stigma- and cost-reducing venue to help screen and treat those who search for but may not bring problems to the attention of their clinicians.”

    “Seasonality in Seeking Mental Health Information on Google” is published inThe American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

    source: The Atlantic

  • Facebook Users Fall for Stalker More than Sex Scams

    by Leslie Meredith, TechNewsDaily Senior Writer
    April 18 2013 04:29 PM ET

    CREDIT: Shutterstock: Mathias Rosenthal

    Are you dying to know who’s viewed your Facebook profile? Scammers bet you are and will tempt you with fake apps promising to reveal who’s been stalking you on Facebook.

    In a study released today (April 18) by security software firm Bitdefender, about 25 percent of all Facebook scams detected over the past six months promise to show Facebook users who has looked at their profiles. But what they get instead is trouble.

    “The most common path after clicking on the scamming links is either landing on endless surveys and fraudulent websites, where you may have your credentials stolen, or on a page loaded with malware such as banking Trojans,” Catalin Cosoi, a security strategist for Bitdefender, told us. “A malicious app can post on your behalf, and spreads on your friends’ timeline[s] as well.”

    The research also offers a glimpse into the hidden desires  of many Facebook users, Cosoi said.

    Second to stalkers (and remember, a stalker can also be an admirer, depending on a person’s feelings for the viewer), the sexy antics of celebrities appear as lures in most scams. The promise of a Rihanna sex tape was used in almost one in five Facebook scams. Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Megan Fox, Justin Bieber , Selena Gomez and Chris Brown followed in order as the celebrity names most frequently abused by scammers.

    The Facebook security team has made a lot of improvements to reduce the complexity and number of scams, Bitdefender said. But the scams persist. Prevention is the best protection: Don’t click on links that make tempting promises, even if they appear to be from a friend.

    Damage control

    But what should you do if you’ve already clicked on a harmful link? Cosoi recommends removing the malicious posts from your timeline  or deleting the app from your account in the AppCenter. Also, warn your friends and have them do the same. Finally, run a security check on your computer with an antivirus scanner, and consider a Facebook security app to protect your account in the future. Of course, Bitdefender recommends its own Safego app.

    source: TechNewsDaily

  • Father beats daughters with cable for ‘Twerking’

    TNA Reporter

    A video of a father allegedly beating his two daughter’s with a cable cord, after they had posted a video of themselves ‘twerking’, has gone viral.

    The 30-second long footage titled ‘Good or Bad parenting’ shows the man continuously hitting his two girls, for recording themselves doing a ‘sexually provocative’ dance known as ‘twerking’ and posting it on Facebook, the Daily Mail reported.

    In the video, the girls are seen taking turns receiving a beating as they scream in agony.

    People have however been divided in their response to the video, with some commending the father for playing a stern role as a parent.

    “We don’t know how these girls’ behaviour was prior to this video. However, I do respect this father for being a firm presence in his little girl’s lives and teaching them the error of their ways,” one YouTube viewer commented.

    “This was not abuse! As parents our rights to discipline our children have been taken away. Even in our school system. This is one reason why our youth is so out of control,” another added.

    Others were angered by the man’s method of discipline.

    “This is the easiest way to end up resenting your father/parents. It is possible to sternly discipline your children without causing them physical harm. Your children should respect you, not fear you,” one person said.

    “I don’t care what the circumstances are…an adult should never deal with a child in anger. EVER,” another added.

    “If this was done with a belt I would be alright with it but because it’s not and he did it with all his might, I feel he took it too far,” another person commented.

    source: The New Age