Privacy issues

1. I want to be in control on the data that I share
2. I am concerned about my privacy and therefore I do want to be in control of my data (or at least in as much control as possible)
3. I do not want to have anybody else making aggregations and connections concerning my profiles apart the ones that I explicitly create
4. I do not aggree that Facebook claims that everything I post/like/share on this social media platform has anything to do with my real life. Actually I am aware of my posts and likes and I was always posting keeping in mind that potentially everybody has access to this content. Facebook Timeline does not reflect my life in any sense. In order to prevent others from thinking so I at least have to be controlling all the activity going on on my timeline or delete my entire account. The latter was the better option for me.
5. Second I am a computer scientist who has some knowledge on machine learning, social media analytics and user profiling techniques and knows how to apply them. So I do know what you can do with data on Facebook and I don’t want to be subject of such action.

Friendship issues

1. 75% of my Facebook friends are not my “real” friends
2. With 75% of my Facebook friends I do not have contact
3. I can also keep in touch with my real friends without using Facebook

Focusing on more important things

1. I want to spend my time in a more productive manner rather than keeping track and correcting updates on facebook (probably made by others)
2. I do not want to use Facebook just as a tool of promoting myself (there are other social media platforms which better suite this use case such as linkedin or xing)
3. I want to spend more time maintaining my blog and less time feeding social networks with the latest gossip news
4. I am not a Social Media Expert
5. I do not want to read only filtered information that Facebook thinks is important to me (well I am aware that Google does the same but at least there is some kind of excape to search for information on other sources
6. …

This are some of my reasons for deleting my Facebook account. What do you think about this?

A NOSQL Summer is a network of local reading groups, that will decipher & discuss NOSQL-related articles, from late June to early September 2010. Each group sets its own meeting pace (usually once a week or once every two weeks) and select which papers are up for discussion.

At every cycle, members read the selected paper at home and then meet up for an hour or so to discuss, debate and answer their own questions.

The paper then gets annotated and is published again on the NOSQL Summer website.

Four of our in the meantime already 12 local swimmers decided to join the first meeting and dived into interesting topics regarding NOSQL and distributed computing with fellow geeks. We were reading and discussing the article called “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” (PDF) written by James Hamilton. Our discussion was first driven this article but soon also covered other topics:

• Cloud computing and setups
• Privacy issues regarding cloud storage
• Social networks and privacy concerns
• Complexity in hardware setups regarding cloud services
• Hadoop and HBASE
• Philosophical discussions on how current and past society deals with privacy specially in cloud contexts

There were a lot of different opinions and views on using internet-services and the cloud for storing and processing one’s own data. Do you prefer to keep your data in a cloud or do you prefer to host all of your data by your own? We did not find one common answer to these questions and I guess you either won’t find one. It was an interesting meeting with friends and I am already looking forward to the next one.

The next NOSQL Summer Meeting will be announced through the NOSQL Summer Website but I can already give you the date. It will take place on the 4th of August 2010, hosted at the campus of Graz University of Technology again.

If you are interested in NOSQL or distributed computing and distributed storage then just subscribe to the NOSQL Summer Group of Graz and we will keep you informed on the next paper to read and on the next interesting dates.

Articles you may find interesting too

• Paper: On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services (highscalability.com)
• Cassandra: Predicting the Future of NoSQL (readwriteweb.com)
• Structure 2010: The Future of SQL in the Cloud (gigaom.com)
• Weekly Wrap-up: Old Spice Videos, TED Talks for Startups, the New Digg, And More… (readwriteweb.com)
• NoSQL, Heroku, and You (heroku.com)
• Disruptive Cloud Computing Startups At Under The Radar – NoSQL – Aspirin, Vicodin, and Vitamin (cloudave.com)
• NoSQL Database CouchDB Turns 1.0 (readwriteweb.com)

(via crowdspring and mashable)

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Image via Wikipedia

Mashable has just published a post titled “Nobody Can Stop Facebook Because Nobody Understands Facebook“. There is an interesting sentence in this post:

Have the nuances of online privacy become so complex that they’re beyond the comprehension of mere mortals? I’m not saying that Facebook has any intent to cause confusion, but the complexities of the open vs closed debate and the prescriptive vs descriptive nature of the “everybody” setting effectively act to shut down public discourse.

I agree that it has not become easier to control privacy specially in the scope of Facebook. I do not really know what data which I publish on Facebook stays there, do you know? Actually when posting on Facebook I keep in mind that everything that I provide is for anybody to use. This you should also keep in mind when you act on Facebook.

Other interesting articles:

• Facebook Personalizes the Web with Open Graph (michaelfertik.com)
• How to Restore Your Privacy on Facebook (e1evation.com)
• What data does Facebook publish about you? (boingboing.net)
• Facebook privacy hole ‘lets you see where strangers plan to go’ (Charles Arthur/Guardian) (techmeme.com)
• More Facebook Privacy Concerns (lockergnome.com)

Here is the interview of Zuckerberg:

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Google Grippe-Trends (Google Flu Trends) ist nun auch in Österreich verfügbar. Auf der extra dafür eingerichteten Website kann man den derzeitigen Verlauf der Grippewelle in Österreich, sowie in viele anderen Staaten verfolgen.

Google bietet auch die Möglichkeit, die zugrunde liegenden Daten für eigene Zwecke herunterzuladen. Für jeden, der sich dafür interessiert, wie das Prinzip dahinter genau funktioniert verweise ich hier auf einen Artikel von Google (Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data), der in der Zeitschrift “Nature” veröffentlicht wurde. Der Artikel steht auch als PDF Dokument zur Verfügung. Weitere Informationen zu diesem Thema können auch direkt bei Google bezogen werden.

It’s time to use technology to rewrite the rules of education …

Here is another one.

Besides I have found an interesting article written by George Siemens on How MIT is going to get large lectures off the blackboard. The whole artikle is called Media Literacy: Making Sense of New Technologies and Media by George Siemens.

(via e-Learning Blog)

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