Tag Archives: privacy

#snprivacy: Journalists’ privacy plea to social networks

This post was written following months of mounting concern about the way new sharing and connection features are being implemented on the most popular social networks. If you agree with what we ask of social network developers, feel free to quote this blog, or tweet marking your messages #SNprivacy. Journalism.co.uk will be putting more questions about privacy policy to Facebook later this week. To have your say, please leave comments below, tweet @journalismnews, or email judith [at] journalism.co.uk.

Re: Privacy policy

Dear social networks,

You say you want to reflect real world relationships and connections. Well, in the real world there are connections and information that journalists don’t want made public, shared or given to third parties. Please help us protect our privacy, so vital to responsible journalistic work. It will help you avoid law suits and government inquiries, too.

We know that we need you to help us work more effectively as journalists, to share with others, and to make connections in ways impossible before your birth. But likewise social networks need users and their endorsement. Google’s head of public policy and government relations, Susan Pointer, recently said: “We live or die by the trust our users have in our services.”

Social networks also rely on bloggers and technology/media journalists to communicate new and changed tools accurately.

We realise there is some shoddy and inaccurate reporting around social networking, especially in some of the mainstream press, but there are also many writers who care about relaying information responsibly.

We believe changes to Facebook’s privacy settings are particularly worrying for journalists and bloggers, who have good reason for protecting their privacy and confidential sources.

As the US blogger and librarian Bobbi L. Newman reported, users now have to ‘opt out’ of auto-personalisation settings that allow their friends to share their content.

Furthermore, as developer Ka-Ping Yee exposed, privacy breaches were made in the original open API which allowed external access to Facebook users’ ‘event’ information. We are pleased to see Facebook has reacted to this and corrected the privacy error.

We believe Google Buzz was naive in setting up auto-connections between contacts in Gmail address books. The public availability of email addresses on Buzz, as reported by TechCrunch, was also of concern. We are pleased to see Google has amended these privacy errors.

Journalism.co.uk has recently revealed misleading information surrounding Address Book Importing (ABI), which we feel does not adequately explain how social networks are using – and keeping – users’ email address book information.

We argue that the default options should always be set so that the privacy of the user is respected. With friend friend finder tools, like Facebook’s, users should have to opt in to share email addresses and opt in to each one shared.

It’s an issue publicly highlighted by Facebook’s former chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly (currently running for office as attorney general in California): he is calling on Facebook “to structure all its programs to allow Facebook users to give permission before their information is shared with third parties”.

We are worried by Twitter and Friendster’s lack of engagement with us on privacy and ABI issues.

Facebook, with which we did enter lengthy dialogue, has said it welcomes feedback. Nonetheless, we are concerned it continues to dismiss the issues thrown up by its friend suggestions and connection features, which are implemented with harvested email addresses. Наши друзья: porno365.plus желают вам хороших праздников и смотреть только качественное секс видео. порно 365 это жемчужина в мире порнухи, куча роликов, много категорий и тегов, вы всегда можете сочетать теги и категории по вашим предпочтениям и найти то, что вы действительно хотели!

In light of the privacy breaches and concerns outlined above, we ask six things of growing social networks.

1. Please conduct thorough user research before you implement new features

2. Please publicise new features before you launch them fully, allowing us time to change new or existing privacy settings as necessary

3. If you change privacy settings, please ask us to opt in, not opt out. Social networks should NEVER set the default option to share users’ information

4. Please provide clearer explanations about how data is shared and how connections are made

5. Please test your new features more thoroughly before launching

6. Please answer our emails or postings on your forums about privacy concerns and reports of privacy breaches – written as either users or journalists / bloggers

Note to bloggers: please feel free to reproduce this plea on your own blogs, with a link back to the original post.

Advertising Age: Calls for Facebook privacy regulation could hit publishers

Will sorting out the press help push through libel reform?

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There was a central conflict at last night’s Frontline Club debate addressing English libel and privacy law and super-injunctions.

How do you relax legal mechanisms, while preventing tabloids and privacy-intruding publications reaping the benefits?

Echoing comments made by Mr Justice Eady in a talk at City University London last month, Carter-Ruck senior partner Nigel Tait claimed that super-injunctions were mainly used in celebrity privacy cases, to protect medical records and former lovers’ revelations, for example.

Carter-Ruck, he said, had issued about 12 injunctions in the past year (shockingly, no central record of the number issued exists).

To let up on these would be an invitation to the tabloids, seemed to be the implication.

David Leigh, head of investigations at the Guardian, finally put his finger on it: there is a problem in his own trade, he said, exemplified by the tabloid treatment of the McCanns.

“Unless we put the newspaper houses in order, it’s very difficult to move the debate about libel reform further forward,” he said.
“We’ve got to reform the newspapers.”

As he’s indicated in the past, Leigh believes self regulatory body the Press Complaints Commission to be “a fraud”.

A television producer in the audience added that he’d like to see a press complaints commission “worthy of its name”.

But science writer Dr Simon Singh, still fighting a legal action pursued by the British Chiropractic Association, doesn’t think this conflict needs to be a huge problem.

In fact, making libel law costs cheaper, he said, will allow more people to sue – forcing tabloids to think twice about the things they write about non-celebrities.

I spoke to Simon Singh afterwards. He said:

“All of the changes we’re talking about do not affect an individual’s right to protect their reputation.”

“Nobody would want to encourage salacious gossip or tittle-tattle,” Singh said. Their reforms address statutory public interest, libel tourism and preventing big companies suing bloggers and individuals.

“If you drive down costs massively, what that means is that not only can celebrities sue to protect their reputation but that the ordinary man and woman in the street can sue to protect their reputations.

“We’re talking about extending justice and fairness to people, rather than making it an exclusive game for the rich and powerful.”

“At the moment a tabloid could defame an individual and perhaps take a risk that person wouldn’t be able to afford to fight back. If you drive down the costs massively, tabloids would actually have to think twice.”

Your guide to the CMS report on press standards, privacy and libel

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It’s been going on for a year, but the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has finally published its report into press standards, privacy and libel in the UK.

You can read the 169-page report in full below, but we’ve highlighted some of the most interesting points in the report in this post.

Background:

The committee’s hearings and subsequent report cover a lot of ground: self-regulation of the press; libel law in the UK; privacy and the press – in particular the News of the World and Max Mosley; standards of journalism – in particular in relation to the reporting of suicides in Bridgend and the Madeleine McCann case; and allegations of phone hacking at News of the World.

In the committee’s own words:

This report is the product of the longest, most complex and wide-ranging inquiry this committee has undertaken. Our aim has been to arrive at recommendations that, if implemented, would help to restore the delicate balances associated with the freedom of the press. Individual proposals we make will have their critics – that is inevitable – but we are convinced that, taken together, our recommendations represent a constructive way forward for a free and healthy UK press in the years to come.

Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report into press standards, privacy and libel

Page guide and key quotes:

p10: the questions/issues that provoked the inquiry by the committee are set out.
p18: recommendation for “a fast-track appeal system where interim injunctions are concerned, in order to minimise the impact of delay on the media and the costs of a case, while at the same time taking account of the entitlement of the individual claimant seeking the protection of the courts”.
p18: report says Lord Chancellor, Lord Chief Justice and the courts should collect data on number of injunctions refused or granted and the impact of Section 12 of the Human Rights Act on interim injunctions.
p23: On Max Mosley and the News of the World: “We found the News of the World editor’s attempts to justify the Max Mosley story on ‘public interest’ grounds wholly unpersuasive, although we have no doubt the public was interested in it.”
p27: Focus on Justice Eady “shaping” UK privacy law is “misplaced”.
p31: Recommendations for the PCC to include guidance to newspapers on pre-notification.
p33: On Trafigura/Carter-Ruck and reporting parliamentary proceedings.
p40: Defendants in libel cases should still be required to prove the truth of their allegations, says the report.
p45: On the cost and difficulties of mounting a Reynolds Defence and whether this should be put on a statutory footing.
p54-55: The committee asks for better data collection on cases of ‘libel tourism’.
p59: On the single-publication rule and newspaper archives: “In order to balance these competing concerns, we recommend that the government should introduce a one year limitation period on actions brought in respect of publications on the internet.”
p72-76: On Conditional Fee Arrangements (CFAs) and After The Event Insurance (ATE) in defamation cases.
p82: Recommendations for better headline writing to improve press standards.
p91: Criticism of the press and the PCC for the handling of the Madeleine McCann case: “The newspaper industry’s assertion that the McCann case is a one-off event shows that it is in denial about the scale and gravity of what went wrong, and about the need to learn from those mistakes. In any other industry suffering such a collective breakdown – as for example in the
banking sector now – any regulator worth its salt would have instigated an enquiry. The
press, indeed, would have been clamouring for it to do so. It is an indictment on the
PCC’s record, that it signally failed to do so.”
p95-6: On moderating comments on websites and user-generated material: “The Codebook [upheld by the Press Complaints Commission] should be amended to include a specific responsibility to moderate websites and take down offensive comments, without the need for a prior complaint. We also believe the PCC should be proactive in monitoring adherence, which could easily be done by periodic sampling of newspaper websites, to maintain standards.”
p101-3: On NOTW and phone hacking: “It is likely that the number of victims of illegal phone-hacking by Glenn Mulcaire will never be known.”
p114: Guardian articles on phone hacking did contain new evidence, but committee has heard now evidence that such practices are still ongoing.
p121: On the PCC: “The powers of the PCC must be enhanced, as it is toothless compared to other regulators.”
p123-5: Recommendations for a more independent PCC.
p126: Peter Hill’s resignation from the PCC.
p128: Criticism for how the PCC reports statistics of complaints it receives: “In particular, contacts from members of the public which are not followed up with the appropriate documentation should not be considered as true complaints.”
p129: A new system for “due prominence” of corrections and apologies by newspapers?
p130: Proposals for the PCC to have the power of financial sanctions.

In-depth coverage on Journalism.co.uk:

Buzz links for journalists

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We’ll be back with a fuller report on Buzz for journalists once we’ve played with it a bit more and had some of our questions answered by Google. In the meantime, here’s a small selection of the good and not-so good buzz around Google’s latest launch.

[You can follow Journalism.co.uk on Buzz here: http://www.google.com/profiles/journalism.co.uk]

On the positive side:

And on the negative:

BusinessInsider warns of some privacy concerns over automatic follows and contact sharing… (with an updated response from Google)
As does Molly Wood on Cnet.
Reddit.com says “hello spam” with the introduction of the vanity URL.

Myler on Mosley: ‘I make no apologies for publishing that story as editor’

More from Dacre: The Daily Mail editor on Max Mosley and ‘Flat Earth News’

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Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has made his thoughts about Justice Eady, the Human Rights Act and the Max Mosley privacy case against the News of the World pretty clear since giving his Society of Editors speech last year, but today he was given the chance to follow up on Mosley’s own comments to the commons select committee on press standards, privacy and freedom.

(And have his say he was most definitely going to – reminding the committee several times of the length of time they’d given Mosley to speak, until one member asked whether he felt he was being treated differently?)

“Mr Mosley, when he gave evidence to this committee, I was very surprised at the soft time you gave him,” said Dacre.

“For Max Mosley to present himself as a knight in shining armour, proclaiming (…) sanctimonious, self-righteousness is almost a surreal inversion of the normal values of civilised society.”

It’s ‘a bit like the Yorkshire ripper campaigning against men who batter women’, he added.

The ruling against the News of the World and in favour of Mosley made the government’s stance on brothels and prostitution problematic, he said.

While brothels are seen by the government as ‘unacceptable and totally wrong’ and requiring a law to prosecute the people that run them, ‘Justice Eady has said Mosley’s behaviour is merely unconventional not illegal’, said Dacre.

“One legitimises the other,” he said.

The Daily Mail would not have broken the Mosley story, because it is a family paper, he said, even if it had ‘fallen into the paper’s lap’ as one committee member suggested. However, Dacre said he would defend the NOTW’s right to publish it.

Nick Davies

Today’s hearing was also a chance for Dacre to respond to claims made by journalist and ‘Flat Earth News’ author Nick Davies at a committee session on Tuesday.

Summised by the committee chair, Davies said the Daily Mail was characterised by a level of ruthless aggression and spite far greater than any other newspaper in Fleet Street.

“Davies is one of those people who sees conspiracy in everything. Like many people who write for the Guardian he believes he is the only one who can claim the moral high ground,” said Dacre.

“The book doesn’t do himself or our industry any justice.”

The book, he added, had been written ‘without the basic journalistic courtesy of checking the allegations concerned’.

Dacre accepted that there is some ‘churnalism’ of press releases at a provincial and national level – driven largely by poor finances and lack of resources, but said he refutes the charge of the Daily Mail.

“I’d suggest the Daily Mail is both famous and infamous for taking Whitehall and government press releases and going behind them. Certainly our reporters when they get freelance copy make their own inquiries and take them further,” he said.

“Our spending on journalism today is as great as ever, despite the recession. Mr Davies makes a valid point about some areas of the media. I think strong areas of the media, including some of our competitors, are not guilty of this charge.”

Comment Is Free: Meyer wrong to ‘pour scorn’ on Mosley, says lawyer

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