At the time - in Facebook - there really was no conception of fully public. One could only be open to their friends or their networks. So "public" was a function of the size of the networks in which an individual participated. To the question of being "open to the network," in 2005 it is fairly safe to assume that 80-90% of profiles were open to the network. We saw numbers like that fairly consistently across some studies run at the time. Best, Fred On Feb 15, 2011, at 12:45 PM, Alex Leavitt wrote:
Michael,
I read through your blog post via a link from Twitter this morning. I agree that's it's a big misstep to include the User IDs. But in your write-up, as well as on the release page of the dataset, there doesn't seem to be any mention of what percentage of the users (at the time of collection) had privacy settings enabled versus were fully public. Any idea?
Alex
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Alexander Leavitt Researcher Microsoft Research New England Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Convergence Culture Consortium (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) http://alexleavitt.com http://doalchemy.org Twitter: @alexleavitt
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Michael Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
Dear AoIR-ers:
Some might be interested in this Facebook dataset release, and the issues I raise regarding its "anonymization".
-mz
Facebook Data of 1.2 Million Users from 2005 Released: Limited Exposure, but Very Problematic
http://michaelzimmer.org/2011/02/15/facebook-data-of-1-2-million-users-from-...
Recently, a Facebook dataset was released consisting of the complete set of users from the Facebook networks at 100 American institutions, and all of the in-network “friendship” links between those users as they existed at a single moment of time in September 2005. Surprisingly, it initially included each users unique Facebook ID, meaning the presumed “anonymous” dataset could be easily re-identified, potentially putting the personal information of 1.2 million Facebook users at risk.
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies Co-Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
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-- Fred Stutzman Postdoctoral Fellow H. John Heinz III College Carnegie Mellon University fred@fredstutzman.com