“This year, we added verbs,” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told the f8 Developer Conference today. You need verbs to tell stories, you see, and Zuckberberg noted that the only previously available verb, “like,” wasn’t up to the challenge of capturing the whole of human experience with the world.

The big announcement revolved around Timeline, which takes your updates and displays them for public consumption. It is an automated autobiographical tool.

Tech 2020 Zuckerberg’s talk was littered with references to the importance of story. Facebook’s new Timeline feature was “An important next step to help you tell the story of your life,” he said. The new product would allow you to “highlight and curate all your stories so you can express who you really are.”

Facebook’s Timeline confirms what writers have long known: narratives are how we structure our relationships with the world. Stories are how we make meaning. And that’s why Facebook wants you to tell stories in the structured format they’re giving you. Facebook knows all your human relationships and the products and content you use, but without the stories that animate those connections, they don’t know what the data means. Timeline — and your curation of that Timeline — is how Facebook is going to find out the stories that you tell about yourself. And that’s probably the most valuable information out there.

You get an automatic autobiography; they get a saleable database of the people, places, and products you love. As you highlight the important photos of your life or add your favorite recipes, Facebook will see what people, products, and services have emotional valence for you. Facebook will know how to hit you with advertisements not just based on your behavior (which they already know) but on the way you make meaning of out of your experiences.

I can’t decide if I find this insidious or thrilling.

Thrilling because Timeline offers the possibility of discovering some past selves that I’ve shed or forgotten. Perhaps I can reintegrate them into my sense of self. Insidious because I feel robbed of the ability to write my autobiography with words.

Facebook’s version of autobiography is very specific. It is data-driven. It is simple: Alexis likes the iPad. Alexis eats a hamburger. Alexis reads The Innovator’s Cookbook. It is a ranked, chronological database of a life. It is technically complex but grammatically simple. It is multimedia, but not rich. It is autobiography without aesthetic effort. It is a story without words.

Zscaler released a free security tool that protects against malicious threats, scams and spam propagated on Facebook through a technique called “Likejacking.” Likejacking Prevention is available today as a plug-in for Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers.

Likejacking is a form of Clickjacking, which causes people to be surreptitiously tricked into clicking one or more hidden links on a web page.

With Likejacking, attackers exploit the Facebook “Like” button and other widgets – including the latest announced “Listened,” “Watched” and “Read” gestures, game “Challenge” button, and even the “Dislike” button if implemented – by getting people to click them.

The “Like” buttons are often hidden transparently behind a “Play” or other button, causing you to click without knowing that you just unintentionally “Liked” something; this causes the content to appear in your friends’ News Feeds with a link back to the “Liked” website.

The result, as you can imagine, is that it can spread virally very quickly from network to network, enabling the attacker to spread malicious links, propagate spam and conduct other types of social engineering attacks.

According to Michael Sutton, VP of Security Research, “Communication mediums on the Internet have shifted and attackers have quickly adapted. Whereas spam email was once the communication medium of choice for attackers, they now leverage social networks to communicate with victims. Overall, Facebook is a more effective social engineering tool because, when exploited, the communication is coming directly from a trusted source. Unfortunately, browsers remain vulnerable to web-based attacks such as Likejacking, and mobile browsers and traditional security solutions have failed to address this threat.”

Google Analytics, the super dominant free web analytics platform, has to date offered analytics that were roughly 24 hours behind. The wait to stop waiting has come to an end and today the company announced that Google Analytics is now rolling out real-time reporting to its users. Update: Just when you thought that was a big deal, Google Analytics also rolled out a premium offering today. Details below.

This is something that many people are going to be very happy about. Real-time analytics startups like Chartbeat and Woopra (whom we use here) may not be among that group of happy people, but publishers and marketers are likely going to love it. You can sign up to request priority access here.

“I never forget a face,” goes the Marx Brothers one-liner, “but in your case, I’ll be glad to make an exception.”

Unlike Groucho Marx, unfortunately, the cloud never forgets. That’s the logic behind a new application developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College that’s designed to take a photograph of a total stranger and, using the facial recognition software PittPatt, track down their real identity in a matter of minutes. Facial recognition isn’t that new — the rudimentary technology has been around since the late 1960s — but this system is faster, more efficient, and more thorough than any other system ever used. Why? Because it’s powered by the cloud.

Tech 2020
The logic of the new application is based on a series of studies designed to test the integration between facial recognition technology and the wealth of data accessible in the cloud (by which we basically mean the Internet). Facial recognition’s law enforcement uses — to identify criminals out of a surveillance video tape, say — have always been limited by the criminal databases available for reference. When Florida deployed Viisage facial recognition software in January 2001 to search for potential troublemakers and terrorists in attendance at Super Bowl XXXV, police in Tampa Bay were only able to extract useful information on 19 people with minor criminal records who already existed in any database they had access to. But the Internet was a much smaller place in 2001; Google was in its infancy, and the sheer volume of data available in a simple search simply didn’t exist.

Often, the problems with facial recognition are rooted in the need for greater processing power, human and machine. After revelers rioted in the streets of Vancouver following the Canucks’ defeat in the Stanley Cup, Vancouver police received nearly 1,600 hours of footage from bystanders furious with their fellow citizens; the department was woefully inequipped to handle the sudden influx of data, anticipating that it would take nearly two years to analyze all the information. Vancouver’s Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab was able to cut the processing time to a mere three weeks with a relatively small 20-workstation lab.

With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.

The repercussions of these studies go far beyond putting a name with a face; researchers Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman anticipate that such technology represents a leap forward in the convergence of offline and online data and an advancement of the “augmented reality” of complementary lives.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/cloud-powered-facial-recognition-is-terrifying/245867/

Cookie-driven intelligence gathering online is becoming obsolete. Consumer protection legislation, private browsing options and the proliferation of cookie-resistant mobile devices are all ushering this era to an end. Yet for online marketers, the need to know has never been greater. Enter AdTruth™, whose patented device fingerprinting technology delivers increased audience recognition and visibility without compromising privacy or performance.

http://adtruth.com/docs/iab_release10-11.pdf

This paper is a chronicle describing the IPC’s work to enhance awareness about the privacy challenges youth face on the Internet.

Source – http://www.ipc.on.ca/english/Resources/Discussion-Papers/Discussion-Papers-Summary/?id=853