Of the Interest of Individuals Interested in How Privacy Works In America, or Some Data Collection Methods
Hey Guys,
Holy wowzers! An extra blog post for a class where it isn't necessary to put on another blog post when there isn't credit involved?
On a more serious note, I decided that since in this class, CIS 3810, we use blogger rather regularly, it would be the perfect place to create a post that's public facing, informal, and still have reach to dozens of individuals easily.
So without further adeau, here's a blog for CIS 3750: Social Media and Organizations relating to a research project we've been doing for the last month or so.
In this class (CIS 3810) I did my research project on the relationship between privacy and advertising, as the two are very related. That research paper is incredibly long, has a lot of material, and for those who just want a simple read, that research paper really doesn't suffice. In this blog post, I'm going to go over some of that privacy material, go over some the results of my own survey that I did of my friend group and my friends' friend group (as that is very close to my target audience, the millennial generation).
So lets go over some preliminary laws, move to the survey, and wrap up at the end of cool ways to collect data (not really cool, but neat).
Laws
Firstly, a law and an act are two different things. There actually aren't any laws written, as laws are forms of procedures, and there are only a few acts that say what you can and can't do on the internet. Acts are actually a subset of a law, and laws have more precedence than acts.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998: which says hey you can't survey and collect data on children on the internet (age 13 or younger).
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1998: which says workers in the work place are guaranteed some level of privacy.
The Patriot Act of 2001, Title IX: Improved Surveillance: The government is legally allowed to use the Fisa amendment act of 2008 as a legal basis to collect data through various means legally.
This is all made super legal due to Executive Order 12333 signed by Reagan in December of 198, which greatly expands the US Government's ability to use surveillance techniques and increase the responsibilities of it's leaders in cooperation with the CIA to collect information.
TL:DR; people can do a lot of things on the internet absolutely no problem. It's also pretty legal for the US Government to do it, and there isn't anything that disallows anyone else from doing it (if it's sensitive to the US Government at least, but even then they probably know about it before most people do).
Survey Results:
108 people responded to my survey, and below are a portion of the results.
Honestly, I put 1-3 option only because I was feeling generous at the time and thought hey everyone probably knows SOMETHING about the patriot act, but im pretty sure if there was a 0 option, that would be the most popular one.
Analysis: People really care about their privacy and their ability to do whatever on The Internet, but people really don't know what go on behind the scenes and if data is being collected on them (which is definitely a hard yes in most cases).
Nifty Data Collection Tools and Techniques for Nerds
Facebook's Graph API is a publicly accessible API that's often used for web scraping (essentially pulling data off the Internet without permission). The code itself is pretty simple, and can be easily implemented in most Object Oriented Programming languages. Facebook's documentation is also really indepth and useful, so below is what that would look like, commented out of course and straight off the API with some explanation.
The user-id-a section refers to just the first element in a list of user ids. Many of you know that there is a unique user id associated with each unique account, and that is almost publicly available (all you have to do is go to someone's account, and it's somewhere in the search bar). Theoretically, all you would have to do with some sort of javascript environment is supply a list of unique facebook id's (which is super easy to get, different guide for that though), plug it in, and viola. You have picture information of hundreds of thousands of individuals relatively easily and relatively quickly. This is a watered down example because it's only photo's, but the API itself is much more capable of doing other things as well.
And that's it! Let me know what you all think about privacy in america and your own experience with it!
As always.
Best,
Sabbir Miah
Holy wowzers! An extra blog post for a class where it isn't necessary to put on another blog post when there isn't credit involved?
On a more serious note, I decided that since in this class, CIS 3810, we use blogger rather regularly, it would be the perfect place to create a post that's public facing, informal, and still have reach to dozens of individuals easily.
So without further adeau, here's a blog for CIS 3750: Social Media and Organizations relating to a research project we've been doing for the last month or so.
In this class (CIS 3810) I did my research project on the relationship between privacy and advertising, as the two are very related. That research paper is incredibly long, has a lot of material, and for those who just want a simple read, that research paper really doesn't suffice. In this blog post, I'm going to go over some of that privacy material, go over some the results of my own survey that I did of my friend group and my friends' friend group (as that is very close to my target audience, the millennial generation).
So lets go over some preliminary laws, move to the survey, and wrap up at the end of cool ways to collect data (not really cool, but neat).
Laws
Firstly, a law and an act are two different things. There actually aren't any laws written, as laws are forms of procedures, and there are only a few acts that say what you can and can't do on the internet. Acts are actually a subset of a law, and laws have more precedence than acts.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998: which says hey you can't survey and collect data on children on the internet (age 13 or younger).
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1998: which says workers in the work place are guaranteed some level of privacy.
The Patriot Act of 2001, Title IX: Improved Surveillance: The government is legally allowed to use the Fisa amendment act of 2008 as a legal basis to collect data through various means legally.
This is all made super legal due to Executive Order 12333 signed by Reagan in December of 198, which greatly expands the US Government's ability to use surveillance techniques and increase the responsibilities of it's leaders in cooperation with the CIA to collect information.
TL:DR; people can do a lot of things on the internet absolutely no problem. It's also pretty legal for the US Government to do it, and there isn't anything that disallows anyone else from doing it (if it's sensitive to the US Government at least, but even then they probably know about it before most people do).
Survey Results:
108 people responded to my survey, and below are a portion of the results.
Honestly, I put 1-3 option only because I was feeling generous at the time and thought hey everyone probably knows SOMETHING about the patriot act, but im pretty sure if there was a 0 option, that would be the most popular one.
Analysis: People really care about their privacy and their ability to do whatever on The Internet, but people really don't know what go on behind the scenes and if data is being collected on them (which is definitely a hard yes in most cases).
Nifty Data Collection Tools and Techniques for Nerds
Facebook's Graph API is a publicly accessible API that's often used for web scraping (essentially pulling data off the Internet without permission). The code itself is pretty simple, and can be easily implemented in most Object Oriented Programming languages. Facebook's documentation is also really indepth and useful, so below is what that would look like, commented out of course and straight off the API with some explanation.
The user-id-a section refers to just the first element in a list of user ids. Many of you know that there is a unique user id associated with each unique account, and that is almost publicly available (all you have to do is go to someone's account, and it's somewhere in the search bar). Theoretically, all you would have to do with some sort of javascript environment is supply a list of unique facebook id's (which is super easy to get, different guide for that though), plug it in, and viola. You have picture information of hundreds of thousands of individuals relatively easily and relatively quickly. This is a watered down example because it's only photo's, but the API itself is much more capable of doing other things as well.
And that's it! Let me know what you all think about privacy in america and your own experience with it!
As always.
Best,
Sabbir Miah
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