This Wall Street Journal article says that many of the most popular of the 550,000 Facebook apps (!) have been transmitting identifying information about users and their friends to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies.

“The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.

Defenders of online tracking argue that this kind of surveillance is benign because it is conducted anonymously. In this case, however, the Journal found that one data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms, the Journal found.

RapLeaf said that transmission was unintentional. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development for RapLeaf.”

Update: Facebook responds.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

After building a huge audience, Twitter turns to ads to cash in:

“In the last two weeks, the company has introduced several advertising plans, courted Madison Avenue at Advertising Week, the annual industry convention, and promoted Dick Costolo, who has led Twitter’s ad program, to chief executive — all signs that Twitter means business about business.
…
Advertisers pay for Promoted Tweets to appear at the top of search results. … Promoted Tweets will eventually show up in Twitter timelines, not just when people search, based on the interests of people that users follow. Twitter also sells Promoted Trends, so advertisers can show up in the list of topics most discussed on Twitter, for $100,000 a day.”

It seems like AdBlock already suppresses the Promoted Tweets, at least this one.

I always think of things I should have added in the hour after making a post. Sigh. Here goes…

The situation is perhaps not so different from mailing lists, Google groups or any number of similar systems. I can set up one of those and add people to them without their consent — even people who are are not my friends. Even people whom I don’t know and who don’t know me. Such email-oriented lists can also have public membership lists. The only check on this is that most mailing lists frameworks send a notice to people being added informing them of the action. But many frameworks allow the list owner to suppress such notifications.

But still, Facebook seems different, based on the how the rest of it is configured and on how people use it. I believe that a common expectation would be that if you are listed as a member of an open or private group, that you are a willing member.

When you get a notification that you are now a member of the Facebook group Crazy people who smell bad, you can leave the group immediately. llBut we have Facebook friends, many of them in fact, who only check in once a month or even less frequently. Notifications of their being added to a group will probably be missed.

Facebook should fix this by requiring that anyone added to a group confirm that they want to be in the group before they become members. After fixing it, there’s lots more that can be done to make Facebook groups a powerful way for assured information sharing.

Facebook has rolled out a new version of groups announced on the Facebook blog.

“Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn’t been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.
…
Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group.”

There are three kinds of groups: open, closed and secret. Open groups have public membership listings and public content. Private ones have public membership but public but private content. For secret groups, both the membership and content are private.

A key part of the idea is that the group members collectively define who is in the group, spreading the work of setting up and maintaining the group over many people.

But a serious issue with the new Facebook group framework is that a member can unilaterally add any of their friends to a group. No confirmation is required by the person being added. This was raised as an issue by Jason Calacanis.

The constraint that one can only add Facebook friend to a group he belongs to does offer some protection against ending up in unwanted groups (e.g., by spammers). But it could still lead to problems. I could, for example, create a closed group named Crazy people who smell bad and add all of my friends without their consent. Since the group is not secret like this one, anyone can see who is in the group. Worse yet, I could then leave the group. (By the way, let me know if you want to join any of these groups).

While this might just be an annoying prank, it could spin out of control — what might happen if one of your so called friends adds you to the new, closed “Al-Queda lovers” group?

The good news is that this should be easy to fix. After all, Facebook does require confirmation for the friend relation and has a mechanism for recommending that friends like pages or try apps. Either mechanism would work for inviting others to join groups.

We have started working with a new group-centric secure information sharing model being developed by Ravi Sandhu and others as a foundation for better access and privacy contols in social media systems. It seems like a great match.

See update.

The peer review process is central to most research disciplines and is used in the selection of papers for publication and research proposals for funding.

A new paper by Stefan Thurner and Rudolf Hanel develops an agent-based model of the scientific peer review process, Peer-review in a world with rational scientists: Toward selection of the average.

“… we are interested in the effects of rational referees, who might not have any incentive to see high quality work other than their own published or promoted. We find that a small fraction of incorrect (selfish or rational) referees can drastically reduce the quality of the published (accepted) scientific standard. We quantify the fraction for which peer review will no longer select better than pure chance. Decline of quality of accepted scientific work is shown as a function of the fraction of rational and unqualified referees. We show how a simple quality-increasing policy of e.g. a journal can lead to a loss in overall scientific quality, and how mutual support-networks of authors and referees deteriorate the system.”

Their agent model has several reviewers types:

• The correct: Accepts good and rejects bad papers.
• The stupid: This referee can not judge the quality of a paper (e.g. because of incompetence or lack of time) and takes a random decision on a paper.
• The rational: The rational referee knows that work better than his/her own might draw attention away from his/her own work. For him there is no incentive to accept anything better than one’s own work, while it might be fine to accept worse quality.
• The altruist: Accepts all papers.
• The misanthropist: Rejects all papers.

I’ve known them all, as I am sure many of us have. As an editor or program chair I’ve met a few other types, including these:

• The Bartleby: His or her response to an invitation is always “I would prefer not to.”
• The Black Hole: Messages go in and nothing ever comes out.
• The Gary Cooper: A person of few words, even when many are called for.
• The Perseverator: Sees all sides of any decision and keeps all carefull in balance. Usually recommends “major revision”.

I am sure I’ve overlooked some — suggest your own via a comment.

(h/t Shlomo Argamon)

Jose Antonio Vargas profiles Mark Zuckerberg in this week’s New Yorker in The Face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg opens up. It’s a short piece, but I learned a few facts. One in fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account. All of Zuckerberg’s acquaintances call him Zuck. Zuck has eight hundred and seventy-nine Facebook friends. Zuck likes Ender’s Game and roasting goats. He considers himself an “awkward person”. Not mentioned in the article, but of possible interest, is that The Social Network opens on October 1.

Facebook has rolled out Facebook Browser as what sounds like a simple and effective idea — recommend pages based on on a user’s country and social network. My impression is mixed, however. While I like it’s top recommendation for me, I am already a fan. It’s suggestions for the celebrities category are a bust — Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin, Red Green and Bill O’Reilly. And Movies? Don’t even go there! Maybe it’s trying to tell me I need a new set of friends? Inside Facebook summarizes Facebook Browser this way:

“Facebook has launched a new way to “Discover Facebook’s Popular Pages” called Browser. It shows icons of Pages that are popular in a user’s country, but factors in which Pages which are popular amongst their unique friend network. When the Page icons are hovered over they display a Like button. Browser could cause popular Pages to get more popular, widening the gap between them and smaller Pages, similar to the frequently criticized and since abandoned Twitter Suggested User List.”

I think the idea is sound, though, and I like my Facebook friends. So, my conclusion is that Facebook needs to tweak the algorithm.

We are generating short status messages for Ebiquity news and pushing them out to Twitter and Facebook. The messages generally have a shortened links connecting back to the full item, which might be a new paper, an event or a blog post. This will be a convenient way to track what is new on the Ebiquity site for many.

Now there are three easy ways to enjoy fresh Ebiquity news:

• Check out the Ebiquity twitter page and follow @ebiquity if you want to have our tweets show up in your stream.
• If Facebook is your thing, you can go to the UMBC Ebiquity Research Group page and click on the LIKE button to have the short Ebiquity updates show up on your wall.
• If you’re old school, you can also view our combined news stream on Planet Ebiquity and/or get it as an atom RSS feed for your favorite feed reader.

The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 11th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2012. The conference series moves regularly between the Americas, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region and we expect that the 2012 edition will be held in the US Americas in late October or early November 2012.

Organizations wishing to host ISWC 2012 should contact SWSA President Professor James Hendler (swsa-president@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de) who will work with the SWSA members who are co-ordinating the bidding process for ISWC 2012.

The process comprises two stages. During the first stage, statements of interest are solicited through an open call that request responses using a simple form. Once the first phase is complete, SWSA will shortlist a number of applications, who will be invited to submit a full proposal, using a standard form and budget template. More information about the ISWC Conference Series and the bidding process for hosting a conference in the series can be found in the ISWC Conference Guide.

The important dates for applying to host a Conference in 2012 are:

• September 30, 2010: Deadline for receiving statements of interest
• November 15, 2010: Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out
• January 15, 2011: Formal applications received from shortlisted bids
• March 1, 2011: SWSA decides on location for the 2012 Conference

The Economist article Untangling the Social Web describes growing interest in business and government organizations in extracting information and making predictions by collecting and analyzing social network data. The article leads with an example of how mobile phone companies in the very competitive Indian market analyze their customer’s social networks to identify the most influential ones in order to “keep them on board with special discounts and promotions”. (See Social ties and their relevance to churn in mobile telecom networks.

According to the Economist, there’s a big market for such software.

“By one estimate there are more than 100 programs for network analysis, also known as link analysis or predictive analysis. The raw data used may extend far beyond phone records to encompass information available from private and governmental entities, and internet sources such as Facebook. IBM, the supplier of the system used by Bharti Airtel, says its annual sales of such software, now growing at double-digit rates, will exceed $15 billion by 2015. In the past five years IBM has spent more than $11 billion buying makers of network-analysis software. Gartner, a market-research firm, ranks the technology at number two in its list of strategic business operations meriting significant investment this year.”

The article also touches on more sophisticated systems that integrate additional information, including V.S. Subrahmanian’s work on STOP:

“Called SOMA Terror Organization Portal, it analyses a wide range of information about politics, business and society in Lebanon to predict, with surprising accuracy, rocket attacks by the country’s Hizbullah militia on Israel. Attacks tend to increase, for example, as more money from Islamic charities flows into Lebanon. Attacks decrease during election years, particularly as more Hizbullah members run for office and campaign energetically. By the middle of 2010 SOMA was sucking up data from more than 200 sources, many of them newspaper websites. The number of sources will have more than doubled by the end of the year.”

Twitter’s planned shortening of all links via its t.co service is about to happen. The initial motivation was security, according to Twitter:

“Twitter’s link service at http://t.co is used to better protect users from malicious sites that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful activity. A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there’s a match, users can be warned before they continue.”

Declan McCullagh reports that Twitter announced in an email message that when someone click “on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click.” Such information is extremely valuable. Give Twitter’s tens of millions of active users, just knowing how often certain URLs are clicked by people indicates what entities and topics are of interest at the moment.

“Our link service will also be used to measure information like how many times a link has been clicked. Eventually, this information will become an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting.”

Associating the clicks with a user, IP address, location or device can yield even more information — like what you are interested in right now. Moreover, Twitter now has a way to associate arbitrary annotation metadata with each tweet. Analyzing all of this data can identify, for example, communities of users with common interests and the influential members within them.

Note that Twitter has not said it will do this or even that it will record and keep any user-identifiable information along with the clicks. They might just log the aggregate number of clicks in a window of time. But going the next step and capturing the additional information would be, in my mind, irresistible, even if there was no immediate plan to use it.

Search engines like Google already link clicks to users and IP addresses and use the information to improve their ranking algorithms and probably in many other ways. But what is troubling is the seemingly inexorable erosion of our online privacy. There will be no way to opt out of having your link wrapped by the t.co service and no announced way to opt out of having your clicks logged.

Microsoft’s Bing team announced on their blog that that the Bing search engine is “powering Yahoo!’s search results” in the US and Canada for English queries. Yahoo also has a post on their Yahoo! Search Blog.

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

“Tuesday, nearly 13 months after Yahoo and Microsoft announced plans to collaborate on Internet search in hopes of challenging Google’s market dominance, the two companies announced that the results of all Yahoo English language searches made in the United States and Canada are coming from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The two companies are still racing to complete the transition of paid search, the text advertising links that run beside and above the standard search results, before the make-or-break holiday period — a much more difficult task.”

Combining the traffic from Microsoft and Yahoo will give the Bing a more significant share of the Web search market. That should help them by providing both companies with a larger stream of search related data that can be exploited to improve search relevance, ad placement and trend spotting. It will also help to foster competition with Google focused on developing better search technology.

Hopefully, Bing will be able to benefit from the good work done at Yahoo! on adding more semantics to Web search.