Facebook won't let you forget your ex, can make 'moving on' difficult

New York: Even though photos of your ex on Facebook can be deleted
with just a click, the proliferation of social networking sites has
made forgetting after a break-up a bigger chore, a new study has
found.
"People are keeping huge collections of digital possessions," said
Steve Whittaker, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz who
specialises in human-computer interaction.
"There has been little exploration of the negative role of digital
possessions when people want to forget aspects of their lives," said
Whittaker.
Whittaker and co-author Corina Sas, of Lancaster University, examined
the challenges of digital possessions and their disposal after a
romantic breakup.
Digital possessions, include photos, messages, music, and video stored
across multiple devices such as computers, tablets, phones, and
cameras, researchers said.
Their pervasiveness "creates problems during a breakup, as people
'inhabit' their digital space where photos and music constantly remind
them about their prior relationship."
In interviews with 24 young people between the ages of 19 and 34,
Whittaker and Sas found that digital possessions after a breakup are
often evocative and upsetting, leading to distinct disposal
strategies.
Twelve of the subjects were deleters, eight were keepers, and four
others were selective disposers.
Some of the heartbroken may want to forget but are "extremely
resistant to actual deletion," Whittaker and Sas found, most often the
"dumpees." Others later regret disposing of everything.
Disposal is made more difficult today because "digital possessions are
in vast collections spread across multiple devices, applications,
web-services, and platforms," they said.
"When the relationship is good, this promotes a rich digital life. But
when it sours... people have to systematically cull collections across
multiple digital spaces," researchers said.
Facebook photos can be untagged but not deleted if posted by someone
else. "It's time consuming and emotionally taxing because people tend
to re-engage with possessions, especially photos," they note.
Some of the initial tactics encountered were: changing one's
relationship status to "single," immediately unfriending or blocking
ex-partner's access to ones' profile.
The study appears in the conference proceedings.
ibnlive

Courting controversy: Facebook's 'confession pages'

It remains to be seen whether this latest trend in social media is a boon or a bane, says Paloma Sharma. Illustrations: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

On March 29 this year, Dr Mansing Pawar, Dean of Mumbai's Government Dental College, was forced to lodge an official complaint against a Facebook page titled 'GDC Mumbai Confessions' with the city police's Cyber Crime Cell.

The 'confessions' GDC students posted on this page contained derogatory remarks about female classmates and criticism of the teachers, the dean and the college -- and although the page had been taken down a day before the official complaint was filed, the police are still on a hunt for the perpetrators.

While this is an extreme case of misuse of the latest trend in social media, ie Facebook's 'confession pages', it is far from being the only one. The Mumbai police have sent notices to the administrators of five other confession pages, two of which are attributed to disgruntled students of Jai Hind College, and Holy Angels High School and Junior College. It is also believed that confession pages of prestigious Mumbai schools like Jamnabai Narsee have been nipped in the bud by internal forces.

Confessions posted on these pages may be a source of entertainment to those who write or read them, but they can cause serious embarrassment to the teachers or classmates they target. Almost always, these confessions are made from behind a veil of anonymity that empowers the writer to post practically anything and get away with it. Although the administrators of confession pages must censor obscene remarks and other explicit content, they often allow inappropriate material to be posted to make it more 'exciting'.

Facebook's confession pages went viral a few months ago and now the problem has spiralled out of control. With every other school, college or residential complex getting its own confession page, the situation has become highly volatile. A majority of young, regular Facebook users is active, on an average, on at least two confession pages -- that of their school/college, and the locality they reside in. Though not all confession pages are misused, the risk lingers and a single malicious comment from an unknown source can create social paranoia in an individual or affected minority.

The Man Who Wants to Sue Facebook Raymond Bechard has been campaigning to keep the social networking site free of child pornography

A fervent supporter of causes for children and women, it wasn’t long before I stumbled upon the online campaign ‘Force Facebook to Block all Child Pornography’ by Men against Prostitution and Trafficking (Menapat). The social networking site that has become such an indispensable part of our lives had apparently turned into a haven for child exploiters.


According to Raymond Bechard, executive director of Menapat, one of the first to take note of this phenomenon, Facebook pages devoted to child pornography and paedophile activities are used to exchange photographs, videos and posts. Before Bechard came into the picture in 2010 with his campaign to get Facebook to take action, child nudity was easy to come by. Now, says Bechard, the images are “just on the edge, but you still wouldn’t want your child to be that”.


A quick scan brings up fake profiles with photographs of children as young as six or seven years of age, skimpily clad and in sexual poses. A girl barely 12 years old, with poker straight brown hair, glamorous eye make-up, accentuated lips and a spaghetti strap top through which an electric blue bra strap is clearly visible. Another girl, maybe 11 years old, lifting her bikini top, her legs wide apart. One of the comments on this photograph reads, ‘Young hot sexy.’


The US-based Bechard was doing research for his book The Berlin Turnpike, on human trafficking in America, when he came across similar photographs of children on Facebook. His curiosity arose when the classified advertisement website Craigslist, headquartered in San Francisco, shut down its ‘Adult services’ section in 2010 after being accused of housing and promoting prostitution, apart from child and human trafficking. “I realised that these advertisements marketing sex services had to move somewhere else on the internet, which included websites like escorts.com, backpage.com. But I soon realised that a lot of it had, in fact, migrated to Facebook. You see, unlike Craigslist, Facebook allowed these traffickers to contact people themselves. They didn’t have to wait for someone to contact them,” says Bechard.


Bechard then created a false profile for himself on Facebook under the alias Heather Fey. “Heather,” he says,“was an attractive, fun and outgoing girl. She had several open galleries for people to see on her ‘profile’ in which there were images that were quite sexy. Her profile picture, too, was of the same nature. She used to update it frequently and men could contact her openly.” Within a week, Heather had about 600 odd friend requests; some of these profiles had pictures of children on them. Delving deeper, he found that these profiles had open galleries with images of children posing provocatively; some were nude and these were open for anyone to see on Facebook.


“So yeah, that’s pretty much when I realised that this is something that shouldn’t be here,” he says. “We knew that something was systemically wrong, so in addition to reporting it to Facebook, we reported it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [in the US] and also to the FBI.”


In 2011, Bechard started Menapat to fight the cause. While tracking the pages, Bechard figured that paedophiles had an easy way of contacting one another. While certain profiles had children’s pictures, some referred to the book Lolita or contained words like ‘child’, pedo’, ‘kid’, ‘young’ or ‘little’. With the help of a false profile created by Bechard, the FBI was even able to arrest a Kentucky resident, Jerry Cannon, for disseminating child pornography through 13 different fake profiles on Facebook. He was, incidentally, also the pastor of a church.


The disturbing part, though, is that it is not easy to put a stop to such activity. Once a user reports a profile or a page, Facebook takes it down, but it can’t stop the people involved from stealthily opening new pages. Also, once a picture has been reported, it is taken down but the person or page displaying such a picture isn’t put under the scanner until reported separately. After Bechard’s campaign and several news reports on the phenomenon, Facebook did try to block reported images. A Facebook spokesperson stated: “We have zero tolerance for child pornography being uploaded onto Facebook and are extremely aggressive in preventing and removing child exploitative content. We scan every photo that is uploaded to the site using PhotoDNA to ensure that this illicit material can’t be distributed and we report all instances of exploitative content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. We’ve built complex technical systems that either block the creation of this content, including in private groups, or flag it for quick review by our team of investigations professionals.”


PhotoDNA basically identifies the picture by reading its pixelations, unique for every image. “It is like a human fingerprint,” says Bechard. The drawback, he claims, is that it can only detect a picture if it is already in the system. “If you’re paedophile and know your photos are registered, it encourages you to create new images and that basically leads to more child porn. Another thing is that it can’t detect videos, and that is a major drawback in itself,” says Bechard. Nonetheless, the steps did have some effect. “Recent changes include images that aren’t as sexually overt. But even in these, the comments next to pictures are the silver bullet. The paedophiles’ intentions are mirrored in those,” says Bechard.


It’s easy to verify these claims. Within four days of creating a false profile myself, I found pages that use cartoon images like ‘Pedobear’, a meme centred round paedophilia. After ‘liking’ a few pages, Facebook’s system started suggesting more pages with similar content. It also flashed many profiles—some obviously fake— with children’s pictures on them under ‘People you may know’. Some pages had external links that re-routed one to websites rife with pornographic material. “It’s just everywhere. Absolutely global,” exclaims Bechard, “You know I feel that human nature goes wherever humans go. It cannot be defined by boundaries.”


Facebook insists it has been working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the New York State Attorney General’s Office in the US, as well as the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in the UK, to use known databases of child exploitative material to heighten its detection and bring those responsible to justice. But Bechard says it is still not enough. “If you look at adult porn sites, you’ll notice that they keep their sites absolutely child porn free because they don’t want to get in trouble with authorities or invite any kind of legal action. So, if they can do it, why can’t Facebook?” he asks.


According to Bechard, Facebook has declined to work with Menapat directly. “Facebook refused to consider us and our plea. According to them, we aren’t from any law authority and neither have educational credibility, so they refused to listen to us,” he says.


And he doesn’t trust them enough to tackle this problem on their own. “Facebook constantly says ‘Tell us and we’ll tell the authorities’. It is basically asking us to report to them, not to authorities directly. But what happens of the proof once a page with such content is gone? Nobody knows. Throughout this time, since we’ve been in contact with them, Facebook officials say that they are constantly improving their security system, that ‘it’s not as bad as it looks’, ‘we’re working with law enforcements’, and basically toe the company line.”


While Facebook’s spokesperson insists that “we’ve created a much safer environment on Facebook than exists offline, where people can share this disgusting material in the privacy of their own homes without anyone watching”, Bechard continues to find and report any illicit content Menapat finds on Facebook, “and there’s still so much of it”. Twitter, he says, is “horrible in this respect” but Menapat is solely focusing on Facebook for now. “You know, it’s not something that will end in a matter of days or even years. Maybe someday we’ll wake up and it will all be gone,” he says.


The most important mission right now, though, is to locate a victim of child pornography. “We are trying to locate a victim so that s/he can sue Facebook for not taking down the picture,” he says. Menapat, he says, has been communicating through the media both on the issue of child pornography on Facebook and the need to find victims.


“We have not found a victim yet. The problem is that Facebook is relatively new, so victims posted there are still quite young. As such, they are still hidden from view and not of age to come forward as witnesses. If they have been rescued from the situation, then they are being highly protected—and justifiably so. We may have to wait years for legal action against Facebook to become a reality,” he says.

Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook

For the past decade, I've tried every new social media product to come
along but I find myself returning to the two giants of the industry
most often: Twitter and Facebook. I'm optimistic and delighted every
time I open up Twitter on my browser, while Facebook is something I
only click on once or twice a day and always with a small sense of
dread. This week I sat down to think about why that is.

Twitter put simply is fun, fantastic, and all about the here and now.
The fact that I can't even search my own feed for past things I've
said makes it exist almost entirely in the present tense. The people I
follow are people I know, people I work with and live near, but also a
good dose of random comedians, musicians, and celebrities I'll never
meet. The things everyone tweets about are mostly jokes or things that
make you smile, either random things that popped into the writers'
heads or comments on current events.

There's no memory at Twitter: everything is fleeting. Though that
concept may seem daunting to some (archivists, I feel your pain), it
also means the content in my feed is an endless stream of new
information, either comments on what is happening right now or
thoughts about the future. One of the reasons I loved the Internet
when I first discovered it in the mid-1990s was that it was a clean
slate, a place that welcomed all regardless of your past as you wrote
your new life story; where you'd only be judged on your words and your
art and your photos going forward.

Facebook is mired in the past. My spouse resisted Facebook for many
years and recently I got to watch over her shoulder as she signed up
for an account. They asked her about her birth and where she grew up
and what schools she attended, who her family might be. By the end of
the process, she was asking me how this website figured out her entire
social circles in high school and college. It was more than a little
creepy, but that's where her experience began.

My experiences with Facebook are roughly similar. At first I only
signed up to try it out and later (after quitting a few times) I kept
running into applications that required Facebook, so I kept my account
around. After the initial rush of adding a few personal friends, I
started to get a steady stream of people coming out of my past to
contact me. It feels strange to be active and highly visible on the
Web for 15 years but it was only when I joined Facebook that someone
from elementary school or high school ever contacted me.

Touching base with an old acquaintance is all about catching up. If I
haven't talked to someone in 20 years, the level of detail I'd like to
see is what you typically see in letters from a family that accompany
their holiday cards. Let me see a photo, how many kids do you have,
what trips did you recently take, where are you working, how is
everyone doing, and that's about all I want to know for the next 20
years. But on Facebook I only have the option of adding an old
acquaintance as a friend or denying them, and then I am met with daily
updates on their daughter's ballet classes, photos from their
workplace, and who they think should win the big game tonight,
forever. I kind of wish I could just see a person's About page for
five minutes and move on, as I don't need the daily detail/updates of
every old high school buddy's life. Facebook doesn't offer much
granularity in this regard, without moving all your friends into
complex groups with different levels of permissions.

If I look at everyone I'm following on Twitter, by and large they are
peers I've known for the past few years in my current circle of
friends, people that excite me with new ideas, music, and art, and
lots of humor. On Twitter, I have no idea where most people grew up,
what schools they attended, and they are similarly in the dark when it
comes to me. You get to know more about the people you follow day by
day as their comments and ideas fill my picture of what makes them
tick.

At Facebook, half the people in my recent feed are defined by the
university they attended, even if that was 50 years ago. Their
location is mentioned in posts and prominently on their profile, as
well as their entire school history. Heck, the whole notion of
organization at Facebook is now defining a person as a "Timeline." I
find the new life history Timeline approach to be a way of constantly
dredging up the past, to show others how it shaped this person, and
it's not necessarily the best way to define ourselves.

I like my current social circle of friends and their thoughts, jokes,
and ideas they share each day on Twitter. I know I'll be delighted
with new information on Twitter, interesting articles to read,
breaking news, and jokes about those. Twitter is a steady stream of
mostly joy and makes my life better. Facebook is filled with people I
barely know, chain-emails and disaster news about the sky falling that
reminds me of my own past as well as my "friends" at every turn. The
Internet is here today and all about tomorrow, and I prefer my social
media to reflect that, and that's why I love Twitter.

(Honestly, if I didn't like music on Spotify so much, I'd never have
had this problem of how to deal with old friends and family on
Facebook.)

medium.com

Facebook snaps up mobile photo sharing firm Lightbox, decides Instagram isn't enough

We get the impression that Facebook is on a big mobile photo sharing kick: just weeks after it bought Instagram for a cool billion, the social network has just hired the staff behind Lightbox. The two-man team of Nilesh Patel and Thai Tran is bringing its mostly Android- and HTML5-focused knowledge over to Facebook, where it's hoping to reach many, many more people. You'll have to wait awhile to see what the Lightbox team brings to Facebook's ever more mobile platform, but you'll also want to hurry if you want to keep anything hosted on Lightbox: the service shuts down on June 15th. As a consolation for the shutdown, the startup's code is being posted to GitHub so that the fruits of its efforts live on in open-sourced form.


The original article appeared in engadget here