No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

seems like an anachronism given Facebook’s current business model that encourages sharing with Third-Party applications and sites. While Facebook’s future redefinitions of privacy may only be speculated by those outside of the company, the framework for the site’s ongoing reconstructions of privacy’s meaning comes through in the 2006 privacy policy.

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

The idea of reasonable community limitations is the key to understanding this shift, as is Facebook’s assertion that they will tell you what community limitations are. communities have always been the determining factor behind standards of privacy much as they are of obscenity. In much the same way that the standards for language in a kindergarten are more stringent from those in a bar, expectations of privacy vary between the relative anonymity a large city allows compared to the environment present in a college dormitory.

Google hasn’t been a force strengthening a strong concept of privacy online either, especially in light of the way that Buzz was rolled out or considering Eric Schmidt’s comments on the matter. In a piece highlighting aspects of life on the Google campus, Valleywag offers some of the more disturbing bits from a Googler’s blog. But are they intrinsically disturbing? My life and the community standards that I have picked up lead me to be put off by some aspects of the Google lifestyle, but I could probably adapt to them. Most people could. The question is should we? To what extent should we be adapting our standards of privacy? These aren’t empty questions as the people working to decide prevailing standards or privacy are in large part going to be working in environments like Google’s new implementation of the company town.

Links: [EFF Facebook Timeline] [Googleplex Life]

As an additional note for those wishing to opt out of Facebook’s Instant personalization feature the EFF has a guide to disabling it.

Connections

In a change announced earlier this week on the Facebook blog activities and interests listed on a user’s profile information will be linked to “community pages” centered around those interests. The EFF covers implications of this new connections system very well on their Deeplinks blog.

Facebook follows you on the internet

Thanks to Social Plugins website operators now have the ability to embed “like” buttons on their own websites. No longer do they need you to be on the actual Facebook site to like the wares that they pedal on Facebook. Prompted by a post on the Facebook blog I went to Levis.com in order to bring back evidence of the feral “like” buttons in the wild.

Exhibit A: Twelve pants each with a “like” button

Exhibit B: Product page for a pair of pants

Clicking any of these like buttons produces the same result as clicking a “like” button on the main Facebook site, which as it turns out does something differently now than it would have a week ago. Clicking a “like” button now does what becoming a fan of something of Facebook used to do. On Facebook Pages instead of displaying fans of the pages topic it displays people who like the page’s topic. It was announced a while ago that this change was happening, but now its in place and judging from how many times Facebook has reverted major changes this is how things are going to stay unless it gets replaced with something newer.

Facebook Applications Leave Facebook

Perhaps the biggest announcement at f8 was Microsoft’s new collaborative office web application Docs.com. This new application uses Facebook as its sign in rather than any of Microsoft’s existing sign in services and represents the most dangerous potential outcome for the Internet at large to arise from Facebook’s expansion, the possibility that Facebook could become the single sign on service for most of the internet’s largest sites.

Yelp and Pandora are also involved in this pilot effort to expand Facebook applications outside of Facebook, but the also appear to be maintaining their existing sign in systems, as is probably necessary to keep their user base intact. The move here though is to allow your signed in Facebook session to follow you across the internet to other sites which would interact with you information in the manner that existing applications for Facebook already do, but without being Facebook applications per se. Depending on how far this spreads beyond the three sites involved in this pilot this could make Facebook the big thing that Google has been afraid of. Considering that Google is beginning to be targeted with calls for anti-trust investigations. Facebook might not be far behind.

As far is I know Anil Dash’s question as to why the default privacy settings aren’t good enough for Mark Zuckerberg remains unanswered.

Apparently I’m doing it.

First: Toyota Damage Control and Diagnosis

As Toyota begins to shift parts to dealers to address the gas pedal acceleration problem, another accelerator problem may have been found by veteran engineer and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The new problem affects cruise control on his 2010 Prius which hasn’t been recalled. Whereas the recalled vehicles suffering unexpected acceleration are receiving a  physical solution, the new issue found by Wozniak is reported by him to likely be a software problem and he can replicate it under certain conditions. [Explanation on Gizmodo] [Update on Gizmodo]

Falling in line with Toyota’s public relations effort that began earlier this week to initiate damage control Toyota has decided to borrow his car for a week to put it through tests. [Jalopnik]

This incident highlights the cautions that need to continue to be taken as we continue to use electronics in places where in the past mechanical systems were in place. When Toyota first issued an advisory on unexpected accelerator issues in September the proposed problem was pedals getting caught in carpet, in the more recent recall it seems that most of the speculation I have encountered revolved around friction in the parts somewhere along where the pedal attaches to, and now in this as of yet not recalled vehicle the problem is in the software running the electronics connected to the pedal.

Complex systems are hard to troubleshoot. It is a shame this problem lacked a more graceful and safer way to fail.

Second: Illinois Primary

With a close Governor’s race on both Democratic and Republican tickets, if you voted in the primary today then your vote probably counted.  With the hairsplittingly thin margin on the Democratic ticket though citizens of Illinois can likely count on the strife between Quinn and Hynes to continue for a while as Hynes threatens a recount. Until the situation is resolved expect the next several months to be like the last several where the person governing and the person sending the checks to fund acts of governance keep playing chicken with state funding for agencies and state supported institutions. (Disclaimer: I am employed by Southern Illinois University which is supported by state funds)

If it wasn’t such a close election I might have posted on the above image. [NASA]

When Gramm-Leach-Bliley repealed the restrictions from Glass-Steagall which prevented several different types of financial institutions from merging, each class of which performed different market functions, it removed and important barrier which served to assist in preventing bad transactions and toxic securities.  That barrier was the need to do business with other institutions to accomplish certain kinds of transactions. The merging of differing types of financial players into single businesses allowed internal transactions to take place which created securities that would not have been created had these securities had to have been created through the cooperation of several different businesses.

The collateralized debt obligations and mortgage backed securities which precipitated the crisis would have been much more difficult to craft had the transactions necessary to create then been made to go through outside firms rather than being crafted in house before being released for purchased by other firms. The necessity of dealing with an outsider to have individual mortgages and other debts repackaged makes it harder to include bad debts in the final securitized amalgamation of debt, because the other firm isn’t going to want to buy something that it can’t make money on.

Both parties to a transaction enter that transaction because they are under the impression that they are getting a good deal. The adversarial element that comes from the possibility of a transaction offering a lopsided benefit makes caution a virtue in deciding which transaction to enter. The diminished amount of trust involved in doing a transaction with an outside entity offers a check that isn’t present when a firm can produce a finished product internally.

The problem is one of balance.  Trust is what allows transactions to happen in a market economy, but caution is what allows for any level of market stability. The relations between different players on the market or lack thereof are the problem the meaningful stability related reforms are going to have to address as cleanup continues of the current financial mess and the economy migrates towards a more pleasant equilibrium.

There’s a lot of coverage out there already, but I just find it interesting where a lot of the commentary is putting out comparisons of this implementation of maybe or maybe not quantum computing to neural networks.  If this connection is realized further, it would support some hunches that I have had for some time.  On the other hand it it creates a computer that is too brain like, we probably will have a good idea as to how an actual implementation of a Skynet like system may or may not differ from its portrayal in fiction.  Hopefully it will be more concerned with why the Google team used such elementary school-type branding on its predecessors than having the world all to itself.

Considering especially the application of this new technology towards image recognition, a task at which people tend to perform very well, the nature of this technology as possibly more of a cousin to cognition than earlier computing technologies sounds rather possible.  Considering also on the other hand the difficulties associated with building quantum computers in academic environments and the consideration offered in other commentaries on D-Wave that its products are likely frauds, jokes, or some form of joke there is the possibility that the Google team is working on its most elaborate April fools day project yet.