I continue to be surprised by the apparent need to throw these kinds of statistics together. Does anyone still need to be convinced that the communications landscape has changed fundamentally and permanently? Apparently, yes.

I’m overdue for a Facebook rant, but the new year is off to a stormy start. My computer died and I’ve been busy with a few other things:

• I’m PRSA Colorado’s online editor and social media committee chair for 2010, so I’ll be blogging for PRSA Colorado as well as managing the PRSA Colorado accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Wynne Reynolds is producing new work. RedEaselStudio.com is due for a navigation and content refresh.
• Aaron Templer and I have been working on an un-named non-profit project. Stay tuned for more about that.…soonish.*

1. * Note to self: Get working on that name.

According to the press release :

Effective at 12:00 p.m. today, Friday June 19, 2009, the City of Bozeman permanently ceased the practice of requesting candidates selected for City positions under a provisional job offer to provide user names and passwords for the candidate’s internet sites.

They said in a memo to the mayor and city commission that it was an honest mistake and that they believed it was consistent with their core values. I believe them. And I give them some credit for realizing the severity of the situation they created for themselves and acting quickly to fix it.

But they still don’t get it. City Manager Chris Kukulski made a point that only certain staff had access. They still don’t appear to understand the risks associated with asking for that information, using it or securing it. Which brings me to…

After reading the press release and the memo I was also concerned that they were still not addressing how the information they already have on hand is stored and secured, but that concern is addressed in the video of the press conference (WMV) with City Manager Chris Kukulski.

“Yes, that is protected, confidential information and it is held in the same cabinet, in the same information where all other protected human resource or personnel items are.”

The information is safe in the cabinet. I guess I’m relieved. But I hope it’s a sturdy cabinet.

Ars Technica reports that the city of Bozeman, Mont. is asking job applicants for their user names and passwords to all web services and communities in order to perform pre-employment screening.* Applicants are required to sign a form that says:

“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”**

This is a monumentally bad idea.

Under U.S. law, employers must not discriminate against members of several protected classes. Having direct access to a prospective employee’s account gives access to a limitless supply of risky information.

Everything is connected.

You can use your Google, Yahoo or Facebook*** account with to log in to countless web sites, so even if the city of Bozeman isn’t explicitly asking for access, they would have the credentials to access a mind-boggling amount of personal information.

Let’s say you apply for a job and give your prospective employer your Google login information. That gives them access to your e-mail, including access to any correspondence with other prospective employers, your chat history, your search history, your image library, your calendar, your address book, the RSS feeds you subscribe to, the locations you’ve mapped, your health information,**** administrative control of your blog, your news alerts….

There’s no end to the number of ways that one account could be abused. The city of Bozeman wants access to all your accounts.

“One thing that’s important for folks to understand about what we look for is none of the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things, we don’t use those,” city attorney Greg Sullivan told KBZK. We don’t use those? I’d like to hear how that argument stands up when the first discrimination suit is filed.

That’s not all.

Bozeman is asking for access to current business web sites as well. Can they really be asking applicants who are employed elsewhere to give the city access to their company business systems? If they are, then the the city is selecting employees based in part on their willingness to violate their employment agreements and provide unauthorized access to confidential business information.

According to KBZK, city attorney Sullivan said that no one has ever removed his or her name from consideration for a job due to the request. It appears that the city of Bozeman wants to hire people who are absolutely clueless about data privacy and no regard for confidentiality — and put them in charge of protecting applicants’ login data.

This can’t end well.

But wait, there’s more.

There’s nothing on the form to suggest that the city of Bozeman is asking for passwords to access to online banking or other financial data, but by asking for account data like Google and Yahoo that gives access to e-mail, they’re essentially asking for the ability to obtain personal financial data. With access to e-mail, someone can take over your bank account and transfer your funds elsewhere before you realize what’s happening.

But let’s assume for a moment that all city employees are beyond reproach. By compiling user names and passwords, they’re creating a honey pot for identity thieves. Let’s hope the city of Bozeman has world-class data security programs in place***** because that much personal information is sure to attract unwanted attention.

I have to stop. I’m stunned by the staggering lack of judgment behind the city of Bozeman’s decision and the potential spiderweb of unintended consequences.

Photo credit: Mirko Macari

1. * Local TV station KBZK broke the story. The Associated Press has picked it up as well.
2. ** Heh. Three lines for any and all logins. Three pages, maybe?
3. *** Among others. I wonder if they’re asking for OpenID credentials as well.
4. **** Assuming anyone actually uses Google Health. Bear with me. I’m making a point.
5. ***** I know this is a stretch, since it appears that the city only wants to hire rubes who don’t know or care about privacy or data security.

In an attempt to horn in on the love developers are heaping on Twitter, Facebook has introduced the new Open Stream API, which lets third party applications display your Facebook news stream. To their credit, Facebook has addressed privacy controls up front.

Consistent with our previous steps toward greater openness, we believe users must have full control and choice and that’s exactly how we’ve designed Facebook Platform and the Open Stream API. All Facebook Platform terms governing data use apply and an application or Facebook Connect site can only access a user’s view of the stream if the user gives the application permission.

A tremendous amount of personal information is being poured into Facebook, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks  that will accelerate.

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

TheNextWeb gets right to the point.

There’s an enormous difference between Facebook and Twitter which Facebook appears yet to realise, or has simply forgotten. Facebook stores an incredible amount of information from peoples daily lives, including media, personal and contact information. Whenever any of this changes, it appears on your friends news streams BY DEFAULT.

It’s likely that most Facebook users don’t realize that they can change their privacy settings and won’t immediately recognize that their information can now flow out of Facebook without their explicit consent.

Zee predicts a basklash. I think he’s right.

Bonus: 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

© 1993 The New Yorker

You’ve probably heard the expression, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

That was then. The days of online anonymity are behind us. Hundreds of millions of people routinely share information about themselves online, and public records are online for hundreds of millions more. Now, everybody knows you’re a dog — and they know a lot of other things about you too.

But do they know the things you want them to know about you? Do you act the same and share the same information with everyone in your life? Probably not. Family, friends, neighbors, business associates, all see different sides of your personality and know different things about you.

But that’s not how it is online. There’s a a fundamental disconnect between our online and offline identities. Pew Internet & American Life Project’s Amanda Lenhart comments:

Our offline identities and the manner in which we manage them are complex. Even with advances in privacy controls we still do not have perfect online analogs for the subtleties of offline interactions and relationships.

Most social networks, which are increasingly becoming the centers of our online identity management, do a very poor job at allowing us to segregate the various facets of our online identity. Plaxo has made some steps in that direction, but it doesn’t seem to be too well integrated into the service, other than as built-in categories. (And who really uses as Plaxo their primary social network, anyway?)

And even in the age of fine-grained privacy tools, those tools do not eliminate the complexity of figuring out how to best present oneself in a multi-use public space, particularly for those who have personal, professional and family contacts on these sites. Not only that, on Facebook, how others use the site through comments, wall posts and tags and how that information is connected to you via that other person’s feed, also adds additional layers of complexity to online identity management.

Until you can reasonably control what personal information you share and who you share it with, do you censor yourself online?

A year ago, InformationWeek wrote that 90% of Facebook applications have unnecessary access to private data. More recently, Computerworld’s Mike Elgan wrote that Facebook is increasingly popular with 419 scammers.

According to the Open Security Foundation’s Data Loss database, there were 360 data incidents in 2008. With 140 million users, I hypothesized that Facebook is a likely target for hackers and data thieves because it’s too attractive to ignore.

Well, here we are in the first week of January and Twitter was hacked. Oops. I was off target. And maybe I’m still an alarmist and a curmudgeon, because I still think we’ll see another Facebook privacy incident in 2009.

If the user is pleasantly surprised or does not notice, the use of identity information is a feature. If the user is unpleasantly surprised, then it is a privacy problem.

Are you listening, Facebook? No more cack-handed surprises. Thanks.

P.S. If you haven’t watched Dick’s infamous Identity 2.0 presentation, watch it now.

What is it about Facebook that I dislike so much? Is it the pokes, zombies and other random crap that initially flooded my inbox there?

Well, yes. But mostly it’s the cavalier attitude the company has taken toward user privacy, combined with the ongoing requests to give up more and more data and walled garden approach they’ve taken to that data. Now, with Facebook Connect, the company wants to become the hub for cross-site identity management.

I don’t trust them to do that.

Privacy? What privacy?

You may remember the ham-handed way Facebook introduced the news feed feature a couple of years ago. That’s ancient history, and the furor has died down now that people know what to expect.

Then there was last year’s Beacon fiasco. You can now opt out of Beacon, if you know where to look. Thanks, Facebook.

These aren’t necessarily bad features (well, Beacon was bad), but the way Facebook foisted them on their users was inept, disrespectful, and — from a privacy perspective — clueless.

People have a right to know how, when and where their personal data is used. If you want to change the game, get permission.

We are controlling transmission

To Facebook’s credit, their privacy controls have improved over the last year. But you’re still not fully in control of how your information is used, since data that you make available to your friends is potentially available to their applications.

When a friend of yours visits an application or authorizes it, the information that the application can access includes your friend’s friend list and information about the people on that list.

Thus it can access some information about you. Please note that applications are obligated only to act upon the request of your friend and must respect all of your existing privacy settings.

More data in the garden

The number of Facebook users has doubled in the last year, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks the amount of information people share online will also double year-over-year. He’s probably right. With more than 130 million active Facebook users, that’s a lot of data.

Thanks to Facebook Applications, the company has become itself into an aggregation point for user-generated content. As a the entry point to other Web sites through Facebook Connect, even content on other sites will start flowing into Facebook.

One sign-on to rule them all

Wired’s Michael Calore explains:

By being able to use a Facebook ID to log in to Digg, the user’s barrier of entry is lowered significantly and Digg gets more traffic. Likewise, Facebook can continue to collect data about him even when he leaves Facebook. If the user leaves the data sharing option on, every click on Digg becomes, by extension, another data point on Facebook.

I like the idea of single sign-on. I use OpenID, even though it’s… opaque. And I’m not going to get up in arms about the fact that Facebook Connect and OpenID are not interoperable. I’ll leave that to the Open Web zealots.

But this still bothers me:

Data gathered by Facebook Connect on a third-party site can only go one place once it leaves — straight back into Facebook.

The bottom line
More and more data is flowing into Facebook, a company that has demonstrated poor judgment about data privacy, and it’s not flowing back out. That troubles me.

But as much as I dislike Facebook, I’m not leaving it. For all its faults, it’s unavoidable.