I believe that some students make conscious choices to reveal more of themselves because they have learned the value of social capital and believe that “you have to give to get”.  There was a general trend that students that had previously established social networks in high school, understood the value of social capital and were more likely to participate at college early.

There is real risk that they are exposing quite a bit more information than they are aware of.  There has been quite a bit of negative discussion around Facebook’s privacy settings, particularly in that they tend to be open by default, but it isn’t clear to me that Facebook policy is at the root.  The range of voluntary disclosure we found seemed unrelated to settings and more driven by personal choices. 

The issue that more people need to be aware of is just how the combination of relatively benign information can be used to deduce much more sensitive information.  I vaguely remember reading that if a “hacker” has both your birthdate and hometown, that they can figure out your social security # more than 50% of the time.   An MIT study referenced in the Times article found that people were able to predict with 78% accuracy which students were gay males, purely based on Facebook data.   

The story highlights another serious issue, which is the whole concept of personally identifiable information.  An associate director of privacy for the FTC is quoted as saying “Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete”.  Information such as SS#, mother’s maiden name, favorite pet’s name, and so on used to be reliable as a verification of identity. I have to believe that the correlation power of today’s networked computers being applied to more than a decades worth of periodically revealed little pieces of information has rendered the concept suspect at best.  Being as many, many systems use this type of information in order to release passwords, we have a potentially serious problem on our hands. 

The twine linked to a story titled “Ogle Earth: Hunting for Iran’s Secret Nuclear Power Plant near Qum on Google Earth”.  I subscribe to a twine on data visualization, and have been active with Google Maps programming, so I followed the link. 

Once the story was broken, it was pretty easy to change a setting on Google Maps to see which sites near Qum have been captured by satellites the most often and then compare pictures.  My initial reaction was that the story was too transparent and that the writer was educating the Iranian government on how they could “see what we see”.  I then thought some more, because I do not believe that ignorance makes a good foundation for real security either.

It reminded me of an incident from my hometown back in 1976.  I grew up in Princeton Junction and attended some classes at Princeton University. As best as I can remember, there was a Princeton student named John Phillips who wrote a paper for physics class on how to build an atomic bomb.  I never read his actual paper, but I can assure you that “the word on the street” was that it even went into details about how you could find fissionable material second hand.  I remember us talking about “glow in the dark” watch hands and stuff like that. 

I can also remember the 16 year old sense of righteous outrage that came along with the rumors that the FBI and CIA were trying to squash the whole thing. They wanted to confiscate the kid’s paper and prevent it from being published.  Here was a kid that took publicly available research, then actually thought about what he was being taught, and got into trouble!   I do not know whether the Feds really had anything to do with it or not. It prompted quite a dialog about the boundaries of intellectual freedom. 

At the time, it seemed obvious to me that as a student that I had two choices. I could either be educated, or ignorant.  You could study physics and understand how bombs work, or not.  The idea of learning only some knowledge, but not too much, did not make any sense to me.  How do you know what you aren’t supposed to know?

With regards to Iran and their nuclear facility, I have prayed and decided that education and knowledge is the path to security and peace of mind for all of us.  Benjamin Franklin said that “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” I think that the Iranian people, who by all accounts are well educated and intelligent need to understand just how  the rest of the world is free to see what is going on inside their country.  We need to fear less about what the Iranian government knows and care more about what the Iranian people should know.