Does that sound odd? First of all, what’s a phone for if you don’t answer it? But second, who answers the phone any more, given the overwhelming volume of spam calls we receive every day?

You’re probably thinking “Why is he even asking this? When was the last time I answered a phone call?”

Why do I say I had to answer my phone? Well, I had called a US government agency in order to set up an appointment at that government office. First, I waited on hold for 50 minutes trying to reach them. They have no “local” phone number here in San Francisco, only a big national call center. So to make a local appointment, you have to reach the call center, which means waiting 50 minutes. Then talking with them, they agreed it made the best sense to go to the local office. “We’ll give you a callback to schedule that appointment.” Huh? I wait for 50 minutes and then they can’t make an appointment, they have to call me back?

“So what’s the best time to reach you?” “Well,” I answer, “Daytime. Nighttime. Anytime. I don’t care.” And they respond “We can’t do that. We need a one-hour window. We will attempt to call you during that one hour window some time during the next five days.” In other words, they pick a single hour during which I have to answer my phone for possibly five days in a row. Well how hard would it be for them to just call me whenever they have an agent available? Like maybe on Tuesday. Nope. Instead they have to use one single hour of the day, but any time in the next five days.

(This is worse than waiting for the cable company to fix my equipment. At least they tell me what day they’ll be here.)

OK, I thought that was bade enough, but… they won’t tell me what number they will call from. They’ll just call from some random phone number. Meaning that during my availability times I have to answer every call that comes in — something I never do because of the volume of spam calls.

So I tried it because I had no alternative. During my first day of availability, during my “best time to call me hour,” I got a call in the first 4 minutes. Spam. Of course. Then after 20 minutes, another. Spam again. And so forth. During the four hours I answered calls that day, I got a dozen calls. All spam. Yes 12 spam calls. No real people at all.

It occurred to me that actually I hardly ever answer my phone any more unless the caller is in my address book. And that in trying to schedule things, I actually never call people on my phone. Instead I email them or “text message” them. And, in fact, email is increasingly going unanswered by my friends. The only way to really reach someone is to message them. I know this has happened with the younger generation, but now I find it extending up into people in their 70s.

So my question is — and you can just think about this if you want to — no need to really answer: 1. Do you still answer your phone (if the caller isn’t in your address book); 2. When did you stop?

If you do answer, I probably won’t answer your call. Hahahah. Just think about how your own behavior has changed.

The post When did you stop answering your phone? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] in the United States has voted to nullify the common carrier status of ISPs, and thus to kill net neutrality, but of course other nations may not do so and I think there are customer actions that could make it difficult for carriers to run roughshod over this principle. The FCC calls their own action “Restoring Internet Freedom” and I, along with millions of others, contend that it’s only restoring the freedom for carriers to differentiate and prioritize, and charge as they see fit, making it more difficult for us common folks in the long run.

On the positive side, improved and more timely data service seems really attractive. People want it. Faster and stutter-free movies. Voice-over-IP calls without interruptions. Gaming and hugely-fast downloads. So there is actually some consumer pressure to prioritize.

Personally I think most of this is “entertainment motivated” in that the customers who care will be mostly the “consumers” — not businesses and not nonprofits. That’s because even if ISPs charge businesses more for these premium prioritized services, the big businesses will pony up and pay for it. Small businesses and individuals will be less able to do this, and that’s a big part of the problem.

So here’s how I think things will play out:

Advertising — The first thing that’ll happen, and it will be soon, though it’s not specifically limited by net neutrality, is that ISPs will look at your web usage and keep track of the sites you visit. They’ll make money by selling this data to third parties. Are you visiting Amazon.com a lot? You’re probably shopping. Are you visiting REI.com a lot? You’re shopping for outdoor gear. Visting Toyota.com a lot? Shopping for a new car. This kind of information is of great use and worth money to retailers, advertisers, car manufacturers. This kind of data is already commercially shared from web sites to advertising networks, but when ISPs can gather and sell this information, they’ll make money from it. And what’s more, ISPs can collect the data without your knowledge, and without leaving any evidence that they are doing so. Other web sites and advertisers do not have that advantage.

An ISP can also sniff the content of your (unencrypted) email, or your file downloads, which is something a web site cannot do. In other words, the ISP can create an open book full of information it can sell, because it is capable of monitoring every unencrypted communication you make through its connection. You may know that Google’s gmail can sniff your gmail traffic and will present advertising based on the contents of your mail — the ISPs would be able to do this regardless of where your email is held, if the connections are unencrypted.

The Let’s Encrypt project, which has ramped up mightily in the past year, aims to make it easier to protect traffic between you and the web sites you use, by making web site content unreadable by ISPs. The ISPs can still see which sites you use and how long you’re using each site, but when a web site is encrypted (HTTPS) the ISP can’t see which pages you’re viewing, nor what content you’ve viewed or submitted. (And you can also protect all of your network traffic from your ISP using a VPN, which I’ll discuss later.)

So here’s how I think this is all going to play out over a time period of one to three years (2018 to 2020):

The Inspection Scenario — To shape and prioritize your traffic, the ISP wants to understand (and prioritize) the type of data packets you’re sending. In theory and as far as the technology is concerned, all packets are just binary data, but in practice an ISP can look inside those packets (see deep packet inspection) and make conjectures about which ones are video, or audio, or gaming, or file transfers, and could treat them differently. Such as giving them higher or lower priority. Or charging more for some kinds of data. And because the carrier knows where your packets are going (meaning Disney, or YouTube or Netflix), it can differentiate and then prioritize based on financial agreements it may have (or interests) in those endpoints. So I predict that ISPs, who already have the capability to examine content, will be differentiating in some way based on your content as early as 2018.

Premium Services Plan — If the network manager has the capacity to examine your data, it could charge more for certain types of data — for the data that has more value to you. In other words, the carrier might “take a cut” of the economic value of the packets. This would be a lot like your phone company charging you more money to call a bank than to call a barbershop. Doesn’t happen to phone calls because the phone company (in the US) is a common carrier and regulated thus by the FCC. But that’s what Net Neutrality did for data carriers — and that’s now been rescinded by the FCC. I predict that ISPs will announce premium pricing for some types of content by 2019 — starting with voice-over-IP or video — and will promise to prioritize such types of traffic, for that price.

Transfer of costs to the supplier — Using a process we call zero-rating, an ISP may make certain types of content effectively free to its customers. They could make web access free, but inject advertising. They could make music “free” as T-Mobile has (meaning certain sites are free). Or throttle the delivery of (low-quality) video as Verizon has. Zero-rating has the effect of making other content more expensive, and of excluding content or providers based on criteria invisible to the customer. I predict that during 2018 more ISPs will first offer to accelerate certain content (such as video) for a price to the customer, then begin soliciting suppliers themselves to underwrite this, and eventually contend that this saves the end user from having to bear this cost.

Premium Sites Plan — The network manager could also charge customers more, or give more reliable or faster service, for traffic from specific providers. “Get your Disney movies faster and without glitches – $19.95 a month” is what I’d expect to hear within a few years. This would be done by prioritizing all traffic from Disney to you. Or any set of providers. Web sites. Email. And so forth. Any service the ISP thinks it can charge extra for, it will. I predict that by 2019 we will see Top-100 Premium Sites Plans from ISPs. Something that would have been illegal under the Obama-era FCC rules of net neutrality.

HTTPS (web) encryption — We’ve already reached the point where around half of web sites use HTTPS encryption to keep pages and submitted forms private. This will increase to 90% by 2020 and will frustrate the ISPs ability to look inside your interaction with these web sites.

Encrypted email — Here I’m pessimistic. People using standalone email, such as Apple Mail or Entourage, Outlook, Thunderbird apps on computers, have had encryption available for 20 years, though it hasn’t been easy to use until the last year or two. I predict email encryption will only slightly increase by 2020. However, more and more customers use outlook.com and gmail.com and services that use HTTPS encryption on their webmail interfaces, which renders email contents opaque to ISPs. This is a mitigating factor that will continue to improve the privacy of email, except that the email hosting company can, of course, still read your mail.

The Resistance — How could you prevent this kind of predatory behavior? Well even today, you could use a Virtual Private Network [VPN] to encrypt everything between your computer and the net. The encrypted packets are tunneled to another location (beyond your ISP), where they emerge onto the public Internet. For example, if you’re in San Francisco using “BigBad ISP” as your ISP, your computer might encrypt everything and send it to New York City, where it might emerge on a “GoodGuy ISP” network. BigBadISP would lose the ability to examine your data, and consequently could only charge you one rate for all traffic. That wouldn’t prohibit GoodGuy from doing something on its end, of course, but presumably you’d choose to emerge in friendly territory. I predict that by 2018 VPNs will be used by 20% of individuals and that ISPs will discourage their use by limiting VPN traffic. I predict that by 2019 ISPs will differentially charge more for VPN traffic from non-business customers or will require that customers upgrade to more expensive business or “Pro” plans in order to use a VPN. And I think that by 2020 ISPs will block VPN traffic from consumer accounts.

Higher Priced Privacy — And with VPNs blocked, ISPs will offer “Privacy services” for an additional price. In other words, if your ISP can’t see and make money off your traffic, they’ll charge you more to pay for the difference.

So the bottom line here is that businesses are in the business of making money by offering services. ISPs have offered connectivity for many years. That connectivity was priced initially based on bandwidth, then on data volume (particularly for mobile data), and now ISPs want to price their service on the value of the data. They’ll attempt to charge both their customers and the businesses who want to interact with their customers. They’ll offer “prioritized” services for an extra fee where there was no fee before. They’ll throttle services that don’t comply.

Because they can inspect customer behavior and data, they’ll profit by monetizing the value of the information about their own consumer customers. If that becomes difficult because of encryption, they’ll charge the customer an extra fee to protect his own data, under the guise that this is an improvement.

Net neutrality, and its interpretation under law, has largely protected consumers from this scenario for years. Now you have my predictions about how it could all unravel in just a few years.

The post After Net Neutrality appeared first on Sky's Blog.

First, my head was cold. San Francisco summer weather is cold anyway, but wow was my head cold! So I got out Kathryn’s Angel Island baseball hat and it has been my constant companion for several months. About a week ago I noticed it was feeling too hot—perhaps a sign that hair was growing back.

Second, people didn’t recognize me. Doesn’t surprise me that many people would recognize my mop of stark-white hair as synonymous with me. Walking down the street, folks might glance at me and then walk on without a glimmer of recognition. This was particularly true when I had the baseball hat on.

Now to the debate. I think this look is kind of a Bruce Willis look before he was shaving it. Think 1990s. I do not think it’s current. Current would imply that I need a 3-day growth of beard.

What do you think?

[More about the cancer journey]

The post The Brutalist Sky Look appeared first on Sky's Blog.

But a week ago I noticed that it’s not giving me as many names or people I know. Maybe I know one in a hundred of the people it’s presenting. I wonder if their algorithm is confused by my change of orientation and can’t figure out who to present as possible links? Uh, yes, I do know that it’s basing its recommendations on my own contacts, but it seems to have reached some kind of event horizon.

The post Now that I know everyone appeared first on Sky's Blog.

A “backdoor” is a mechanism that allows a service provider or government to access the contents of a system without knowing users’ passwords and without their knowledge. It is essentially a universal key that opens everything.

We hear government officials crying out that this is the only way they can protect the nation against attack. In other words, the government wants to have universal access to every electronic communication, or we will all die in flaming terrorist attacks.

So just why is this the stupidest idea in the world?Well it’s so incredibly stupid because it is impossible to guarantee that a “universal key” that decrypts everything can be kept secret. The government’s argument make it sounds like there’s a little physical key (like a little golden metallic key, let’s say) that could be kept safe in a place like Fort Knox and only brought out when needed. And yes, would be separate keys or processes for each provider or company (one for Apple, one for Dell, one for AT&T, one for Facebook) But encryption does NOT rely upon physical keys—that’s a dangerous argument.

There would be additional processes and safeguards on these keys, but essentially once a key is figure out, an entire company, entire industry, entire set of encryption processes, could be compromised.

With encryption, the  key is a sequence of numbers. You don’t have to break into a vault and “steal” the key to have universal access — you just have to figure out what the key is, even independent of the guys who created it in the first place, and once you figure it out, you’re in and you have access to everything—past, present, future.

Here are some common-sense reasons why this just can’t possibly work:

1. If someone were to find a way to independently generate or figure out the key(s), they’d be able to read every encrypted message ever created. (It’s a bit more complex than this, but it’s close.)
2. The key(s) would immediately become the target of every foreign government’s security services. If one of them discovered the key (stole it, recreated it, hacked an easier way of duplicating it), you’d probably not know. Just suddenly everything would become transparent to them.
3. Crooks will immediately attempt to discover the secret key(s). Don’t underestimate these guys. They are superb hackers and they have many millions of dollars to spend working on this. They might succeed.
4. It’s even easier, however. The key(s) would be stored somewhere on computers. If crooks could hack into that computer, they could probably extract the key.
5. A disgruntled government employee might release the key(s). Think about Edward Snowden if you want to argue that any government anywhere is really capable of keeping everything secret all the time, and forever.
6. Once the key is “out” it’s out forever. There’s no calling it back. (There could be mitigating circumstances on this one, but it would still be a terrible meltdown.)
7. The key(s) doesn’t affect just crooks and terrorists. It would also affect commercial transactions, banking, credit cards, stock markets … in short everything that depends upon encryption could be compromised if the key(s) were hacked.
8. Oh, and public key encryption has existed for years. If the government were to require that in the future there be backdoors for universal decryption, any of the existing encryption systems (which would not have backdoors) could continue to be used. (As far we we know there is no universal key for today’s systems.)
9. You know the phrase “If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.” Well if commercial operators are required to provide the government with backdoors into their systems, you can be sure that outlaws will not, and from then on, only the outlaws will have secure communications.

Convinced yet?

Is that enough? Do you trust any government to do this, let alone to understand the magnitude of this Pandora’s Box?

[1] Interesting Infoworld article about this.

[2] Problems with backdoors Infoworld article

The post Backdoors – How Absolutely Stupid! appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Online advertising has “gotten personal” and can adapt itself so that the ads you see are related to what you’ve been viewing, or shopping for, online.

This means, for example, that when you are viewing a sleeping bag at REI.com, you might later on see an ad for REI—an ad featuring that same sleeping bag—at another web site later that week.

A friend recently mentioned this article in Huffington Post claiming you can opt out of this kind of advertising. They say you can opt out in 2 easy steps. Turns out you can’t really opt out of the tracking, just the advertising itself.

The way the advertising works is:

1. When you visit REI online, a cookie is saved in your browser;
2. The cookie is for an online ads site, not for REI;
3. When you later on visit the second site, the online ads site “notices” the cookie, looks up what you were viewing, and shows you a relevant ad.

It’s pretty simple, and REI never has to put any cookies in your browser—they just pay for their advertising through the company that tracks and then serves the ads, which makes the REI advert appear when you’re on the second site.

The bottom line is that you can in fact opt out from seeing the custom ads. But you can’t opt out from having your information recorded. In other words, you can turn on the blinders and not see the ads, but they’re still going to know what you’re looking at, how recently you looked at it, how often you looked, and every place you looked at it.

The post Opt out from Online Behavioral Advertising? Maybe not… appeared first on Sky's Blog.

What this means is that the theory behind something — in this case encryption using “hard” mathematics — may be very good, but the implementation can be full of “gotchas” — errors, omissions, faults — and that‘s what will get you in the long term. He was specifically commenting on Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security Agency and whether they can read all encrypted messages, but it can apply to many other software endeavors.

If you’re thinking of writing some software whose function is critical, and especially if lives depend on it, you have to be extremely careful with your implementation. And Open Source is a big plus because other eyes can look at your code and spot mistakes that you, as author, are likely to overlook.

So whatever you’re working on, be very, very careful with the implementation.

The post In the long run they’ll get you “in the code” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

They’re experimenting with putting up a page that shows the number of requests they’ve received, and (partially) the action they took, for the most recent six months.

You can view their map and click the pushpins to see country-specific data. For China, it says

Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

Isn’t it interesting that rather than saying “removal requests” Google used the word “censorship” in this case?

To read more about legitimate (legal) requests and requests that do not have the force of law behind them and may simply be trying to intimidate a web site owner, visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

The Open Net Initiative seeks to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance.

The post Google and government requests for data or removal appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Regardless of how you feel about government agencies having unchecked access to this kind of information — If you ran an online service that promised “we never share your information with anyone else” – what would your reaction be to an NSL requiring that you give up something like IP addresses, or physical address, or other information about a user of your service, without informing anyone? Would you be happy telling your users that you never share their information?

What I do to deal with this is have a statement on any service-oriented web site I create that lets users know that we may be required by law to give up information and that if they are concerned about this they should either not use the service or they should never use their true name or address information. But how honest is even my policy if I couldn’t tell users their information has been subpoenaed?

[1] From EFF’s statement: The NSL included a gag order, prohibiting Kahle from discussing the letter and the legal issues it presented with the rest of the Archive’s Board of Directors or anyone else except his attorneys, who were also gagged. The gag also prevented the ACLU and EFF from discussing the NSL with members of Congress, even though an ACLU lawyer who represents the Archive recently testified at a congressional hearing about the FBI’s misuse of NSLs. … Since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, relaxing restrictions on the FBI’s use of the power, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase, to nearly 200,000 between 2003 and 2006. EFF’s investigations have uncovered multiple NSL misuses, including an improper NSL issued to North Carolina State University.

The post Secret courts, secret orders appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The post Reclaim your Facebook privacy appeared first on Sky's Blog.

It’s a “service” that shows my little face photo on sites that subscribe to their service, saying “Sky has been reading this page.” Given what Facebook did to me in December, revealing who all of my friends are^[1][2], I’ve become somewhat protective of where I go and what I read. Why would I want people to see that I’ve been reading some blog that just happens to subscribe to this service? What if I arrive at a site, gag on its contents, and then leave? MyBlogLog still shows that I’ve recently been there.

Goodbye privacy? Nope, goodbye MyBlogLog — I just unregistered. And they miss me already?

[2] The King (Facebook) has no Friends — and Neither do we [any more]

The post Goodbye “MyBlogLog” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Chris started by saying “I don’t have an agenda; I don’t have an announcement…” referring, of course, to the number of companies that had been making announcements on the stage. Probably not unusual, since you want to make product announcements where they will be heard, but it was certainly being noticed this time around.

The full video of Chris’ talk appears at the bottom of this article. I’m going to pick and choose from the points that Matt jotted down.

So, what is the essence of community? Community…

[Chris says] Community… lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, likes, dislikes and the people we link up with;

Sky sez: Community is a construct composed of our connections and interactions — to that extent, wherever we go we bring those connections with us. Because we are becoming highly-linked through electronic media (and social media), our communities may in fact be available to us almost everywhere we go! Communities of interest and Communities of practice are examples of these kinds of virtual communities (unlike our neighborhood, which is a physical community). We all participate in many communities, sometimes interacting in a number of them at the same time.

… is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks;

I have already made a comment on this (prior to hearing Chris), in remarking that bloggers are beginning to spread out beyond blogging and take their communities with them into Twitter, Facebook, and so forth. But, of course you’ve noticed that too. You probably started tweeting a long time ago, added a Facebook or Linked-in profile, and put more of your photos on Facebook now than on your old photo-sharing site. So if it’s true that 25% of Web traffic is to Facebook^[2][3], then this certainly means that some of the social behavior that motivated blogging has moved, with many of us, to Facebook.

… is a commodity, but people [themselves] aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special;

I’ve been promoting this idea for years—and I still have to remind clients that they can set up an online community web site, but they still need people to staff it, and they still need customers’ voices to make it really happen. And when you inject people into the equation, it forces things to scale more linearly and it costs more for upkeep and maintenance of the human community members.

… cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”;

That’s the essence, isn’t it? You have to listen to what your friends, community, customers, are saying. I’m reading Peter Block now, and he’s one of the masters of using transformational change to solve community issues. [Photo is from peterblock.com.]

… is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbour;

About a year ago someone asked me whether The Dalai Lama Foundation wasn’t just “a big web site with a small organization…” At first the question offended me, but that didn’t last long as I realized and even pointed out that the organization in fact did do much of its work online. So it is indeed a large web site with a (smaller human) organization behind it. The organization was and is distributed geographically. It uses network communications to get people going and then local groups of people may begin working on their own. There is little planned organization of this process, and it grows entirely organically.

… grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons;

Leaders arise organically from within communities. Leaders arise when a cause needs someone to carry it forward. At the Foundation we have had six years of growing in response to leaders who arise organically and naturally from our communities. This is reflected in the many projects that the Foundation has incubated or supported. This leaves the central organization small, but promotes the growth of new organizations that respond to the immediate needs of the constituent communities.]

… is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream;

Yes, community is looking outward to see and to listen to what those in the community want. And that’s why leaders develop and grow organically within healthy communities.

… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.

Focus on these points: 1) look for people who share your needs, desires and motivations; 2) connect with them; 3) expand that connection by listening to the needs of those in the communities you form or join; 4) help foster organic growth of leaders within your communities; 5) continue looking outward at all times!

[swfobj src=”http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/2752312″ width=”480″ height=”386″ flashvars=”autoplay=false” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”true”]

[2] Could 25% of page-views on the Web really be attributed to Facebook? Drake Direct says so. Their source for the stats is compete.com, which uses a sampling methodology (they have a sample set of people who “represent” the Internet user population) and projects their results to a large population (all Web users). They are not directly measuring real traffic to any web site—they are estimating. I have done statistical work of this sort, and for certain kinds of probability distributions it is problematic…particularly long-tail distributions. So don’t believe the 25% statistic, but do believe that traffic to Facebook really is quite high!

[3] Remember not to confuse the Web with the Internet. It is only a subset of overall traffic on the net. Email probably still accounts for far more traffic than web pages, and video is coming into its own rapidly.

The post Chris Pirillo’s “Pillars of Community” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

But anyway it’s too late. Whatever harm has been done has probably been scarfed up by the scurrying search engines which have picked up this valuable information while it has been available. What if some unscrupulous operator has already built a private search engine that has traversed Facebook pages and sucked up all of the relationships while they were public. Even if Facebook hides them later on, any such information could be preserved and used by unscrupulous individuals. (And in case you think you can’t build a search engine in a few hours, I built a search engine in 1999 that spiders, on my behalf, any site I point it at… and I could easily configure it to spider Facebook for this kind of information, and have it running on the task within an hour.)

Julia says that Facebook has added the option to protect your friend list (must have happened while I was sleeping). But I can’t find it. I did find a place to restrict what Facebook shows to the search engines, but searchers have ways around that. And there’s an interesting, long post that I found in Valleywag, that deals with some of the intricacies of making your information more difficult to find. It’s worth reading.

The post The King (Facebook) has no Friends – and Neither do we appeared first on Sky's Blog.

EPIC—the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and nine other co-signing organizations have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about this problem.^[1] Read what Larry Dignan says on ZDNet about this. I investigated and found that we’re all naked now…

I checked my own profile and turned the volume down on some of the privacy settings, but I was unable to restrict my friend list – all 127 of them are freely available to anyone who searches for me on Facebook (not to search engines – just to someone who joins Facebook, but that’s trivial). Now I ask you, do you want the entire world to know who you have friended on Facebook? It exposes your entire set of social connections. I consider my friend list to be much more private than the rest of the info they release. (Though I’m not entirely happy that they show my fan pages, for that matter.)  ¡No way José!

34. Facebook now treats the following categories of personal data as “publicly available
information:”

• users’ names,
• profile photos,
• lists of friends,
• pages they are fans of,
• gender,
• geographic regions, and
• networks to which they belong.38

35. By default, Facebook discloses “publicly available information” to search engines, to
Internet users whether or not they use Facebook, and others. According to Facebook,
such information can be accessed by “every application and website, including those you
have not connected with . . . .”39

36. Prior to these changes, only the following items were mandatorily “publicly available
information:”

• a user’s name and
• a user’s network.

The post The King (Facebook) has no Clothes – and Neither do we appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Susan Bratton, JD Lasica, Renee Blodgett and Robert Scoble discuss these aspects of marketing and customer relations in this roundtable in Cambridge as a part of Traveling Geeks 2009.

The post Reaching Advocates and Influencers appeared first on Sky's Blog.