Mainstream media are having a field day scaring consumers into thinking that criminals are preying on users of social networks that disclose their geographic locations. The idea is that you “check in” with a service like Brightkite or Foursquare, letting your friends know you are at a restaurant, the office, the gym, etc., and this alerts criminals that you are away from home so they can burglarize you. There have even been some widely publicized incidents in which this has happened.

“God damn Foursquare! I’m ruined!” Image: neophobic.ro

The latest round of site traffic-building scare tactics was spurred by Please Rob Me, a web site that lists people who disclose through social networks that they have left their homes. And according to confused.com:

“Darren Black, head of home insurance at Confused.com, says ‘criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering, even using Google Earth and Street View to plan their burglaries with military precision’…He added that home insurance providers assessing claims are starting to take information revealed on the sites into account, noting that ‘we may, in (the) future, see insurers declining claims if they believe the customer is negligent’.”

Come on, folks. This is War of the Worlds-style panic. It’s too early for law enforcement to compile this data, but I would guess the percentage of crimes made possible by social network-derived information is statistically insignificant. The only thing that makes sense about this is the idea that insurance companies would be excited about a new way to deny consumer claims.

Do you still drive a car to work or school? Or walk to the bus stop? Because any one of these activities signals potential burglars that you are not home. And in fact, these indicators are much more accurate than a social network check-in, which can be faked or time delayed.

Are there privacy risks to using so-called location-based services? Absolutely. If you’re an adult, for example, you should never check in at home (except with services like Rally that are smart enough to hide the user’s home location), and never check in at your kids’ schools, karate studio, friends’ houses, etc. Letting people know about your schedule and destinations might be foolish. Letting them know how to track your kids is stupid.

For the sake of decorum, don’t check in at the movies or a bar when you’ve called in sick at work. Don’t check in at a competitor’s location. Don’t check in at a rehab center. Use some common sense.

One of the few people who have the right ideas about privacy is Charlene Li, former Forrester analyst and founder of the Altimeter Group, who calls Google’s new “Buzz” a “parental control nightmare.” After taking Buzz away from her children, Li checked out Google’s Terms of Service for Buzz and:

“discovered that buried in Google’s terms of service somewhere is that children under the age of 13 are not allowed to have Gmail accounts. But unlike Facebook, which requires that people enter their birthdates when setting up accounts, Google makes no such attempt to educate people signing up for Gmail that such a provision is in place.”

And my advice for younger kids using location-based services is, “Don’t your parents pay any attention to what you are doing? You shouldn’t be on Foursquare!”

Anyone who thinks Terms of Service will keep younger users from signing up for online services is deluded or lazy. As Li describes it, she tries to stay ahead of her kids by being informed about new services as they are released.

The bottom line is that privacy is a complicated matter. True social network privacy protection can only happen when a number of things are in alignment:

• Developers of social networks and services need to be more responsible about privacy protections and put the safety of consumers, particularly young people, ahead of advertisers’ needs
• Any compromise of privacy, release of information, or connection to another site or service, should only be done with full, open disclosure to the consumer and the opportunity to decline
• Social network new user registration should by default give the user 100% of the privacy protection available on the site, with the option to knowingly and affirmatively remove protections solely at the user’s discretion
• Users must take the time to read and understand the Terms of Service and privacy controls for a site
• Parents need to keep an open conversation going with their children, and educate themselves as to the potential exposure of any new technology

Don’t panic. The Martians aren’t really coming. As Marshall McLuhan said, “Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.”

Tags: Foursquare, location-based services, Google Buzz, privacy, please rob me

When I first joined Twitter, I could not imagine what it would be like to have 10,000 followers, or as I prefer to describe it, to have 10,000 people subscribe to my updates. (Jesus had followers. Twitter users have subscribers. It’s not the same thing.)

I got there honestly, and therefore, a lot more slowly than people who were better at amassing followers for the sake of numeric bragging rights. I never participated in any schemes to add followers, and in fact, did not participate in “Follow Friday” and came out strongly against what I saw as a pyramid scheme. When I was within a few hundred of 10,000, I offered a copy of my SocialCorp book to my 10,000th subscriber and a copy to a randomly selected person who tweeted about it, but by then I was certain to reach 10K any way. If you do the math on the cost of a couple of books, my 10,000th subscriber was really expensive.

When I signed up in June, 2007, Twitter, launched publicly in July, 2006, was less than a year old. Everyone was an early adopter. The conversations were engaging and stimulating. This has changed, and it’s partly my fault for following people whose tweets do not interest me, or in some cases, offend me.

It’s time to review my criteria for following/following back people on Twitter. Way back when (sounding like a wagon master on the Oregon Trail), I actively sought people in two distinct categories — friends and present/former colleagues, and people in allied fields, like public relations, social media, corporate communications, writing and publishing. As I spent time on Twitter, observing early adopters and the triumphs and missteps of the first businesses using Twitter as a communications tool, I became very well informed in these areas, and was often quite amused. As new users joined Twitter, many of them gravitated to me and the other one million or so people who were already there. So much of the early communications on Twitter involved discussions like “What is Twitter?” “Is it for real?” “How does a business use Twitter?” “What a waste of time!” and “What’s the etiquette here?”

Somewhere along the line, that all changed, and now about 25 percent of my new followers are multi-level marketers (MLMers), spammers, people actively trying to sell me goods and services, pornographers, and “make $3000 a minute while you sleep” hucksters. At the same time, Twitter grew from well under a million users to around 20 million today.

My original followers policy was to follow people in the categories I’ve described who interested me, people who came to my attention through an interesting article or presentation; and people I met at conferences and on panel discussions. I also looked for people who lived in my area, rural Santa Cruz County. I would follow back any new follower who appeared to be a “real” person and not a spam or porn account, or some kind of bot.

My online conversational style is to engage with anyone interesting. I don’t segregate by political affiliation, religion, profession, gender, etc. While this is an inclusive policy, it has led to too much noise in my Twitter experience. My inclusive policies regarding political discussion, for example, which once allowed me to see many sides to a political issue, have now subjected me to fringe discussions which are often hateful and offensive.

And I know I’ll get a bunch of grief for revealing this, but I don’t really care for pets. And I don’t have any. But I have early Twitter friends who have pets. (This is like saying I know people who wear shoes.) Others who have come along have observed that I have pet lovers as followers and have assumed I am one, too. But I am not. So people who sell/market to pet owners target me, and they couldn’t be further off their demographic.

I forged some great friendships during those early times, and had my brushes with celebrity, like many Twitter users have. It was great watching Comcast, Dell, Ford, and others as they joined Twitter and began to use it seriously. Recently, for example,  I noticed someone tweeting about their enthusiasm for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I replied that they should follow @kfc_colonel, the official Twitter account for KFC. @kfc_colonel replied to me “Joel, you’re the Colonel’s guy. You were there when we had more herbs & spices than we had followers. Thanks!” It’s nice to have a personal connection with a company. I’ve had the chance on Twitter to “talk” to Tony Hsieh of Zappos, MC Hammer, and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears. Alyssa Milano even sent me a direct message! (I sleep with it under my pillow.)

So Twitter is what I make of it. And it’s sort of cool to have 10,000 subscribers, but the number of followers I have is not as important as who they are and how I interact with them. And that’s up to me. Anyone who says “Twitter sucks, there are too many spammers,” or “Ashton Kutcher ruined Twitter,” can easily take back control of their Twitter existence. That’s what I’m trying to do.

I was interviewed recently by Canadian Press, and subsequently a number of radio stations across Canada, on the effect of social networking on student language skills. The title of the Canadian Press article was Students failing because of Twitter, texting and no grammar teaching, but I don’t necessarily agree with that. Rather, I think what we have is the clash of two worlds and two kinds of language.

We live on the electronic commons of the internet. Our work, school, social, and private lives have become one. This has implications for students who might move from home to classroom to cafe and home again, using the same Facebook and Twitter accounts, interacting with the same set of friends, real and internet, personal and academic, without considering what this entails.

The language of emoticons and SMS (text message) abbreviations might be appropriate for some friends, in some settings, but not for certain contacts and interactions in the academic and career worlds. The problem arises when a person moves seamlessly from one world to the other without considering without adjusting language and style to suit each new situation. Academics don’t want to see informal language showing up in term papers. Hiring managers are bothered by its use in cover letters and resumes, and in a large number of business and media careers, emoticons and text abbreviations are not appropriate in the work the candidate is expected to produce once on the job, so the recruiter rejects candidates who use them during the application process.

Language is both prescriptive (defined by fixed rules in dictionaries, text books, and style guides), and descriptive (defined by current popular usage.) Whereas before, we had, for example, the language of hip hop in one realm and the language of academia in another, clearly separate from each other, the online and offline versions of the language today exist side-by-side, uneasily sharing the same physical and temporal space. The usual lag time and adoption curve has disappeared, and non-users of the latest informal language are expected to instantly comprehend it and speak it fluently, else there is something wrong with them. Eventually, many of these words and expressions may make it into the broader language, but problems arise when we rush this process.

This year, for example, the New Oxford American Dictionary announced that “unfriend” was its “Word of the Year” for 2009. I wonder if five years from now people will be using the word more widely, or not at all. (It would be interesting to see some analysis of the various words-of-the-year from the past and which are still commonly used. I suspect except in the case of the verb “to Google,” the number would be low.)

There are many solutions to this, if you view it as a problem. Students need to show a little commonsense about understanding the difference between social network speak and formal language. This is something that should be taught in basic communications classes. A tactical solution for students is to have multiple social network profiles, one on each site for personal and professional/academic use.

In the meantime, students who take the time to understand this dynamic, and can show some restraint in their use of smiley faces and LOLs, will find themselves at a clear advantage in what is probably the most competitive academic and career environment of the past 30 years.

Tags: language, emoticons, SMS, Canadian Press, grammar, prescriptive, descriptive, students