(Well, except over at David Rees’s page. He threw an “Empty Hotel Party” earlier this month, which involved tapping the keg in Conor Friedersdorf’s comments.)

The Not-So Private Parts will party on, too, but it will be over at Forbes.com. You can find the NSPP (with archives intact, including your past comments) over at http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/.

I hope past readers will continue to follow and to comment over there. My latest post is on Facebook’s new location-check-in service, “Places.” Next week, I myself will be checking in to an eco-tent in the Virgin Islands, but I’ll be back in the full swing of blogging after that.

Follow the Not-So Private Parts at Forbes.

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The physical True/Slant space

True/Slant, an incredible news site with an amazing team, is closing up shop soon. I was privileged to be part of that team on the night the site launched last year and to be among the site’s talented cadre of writers, many of whom are saying “Goodbye” here.

I have been honored to write about privacy, law, & technology for the site. It allowed me to harass Mark Zuckerberg; find and share cool stuff with my readers; expose ridiculousness; use the word ’skank’ repeatedly; ponder the state of privacy in today’s world; and share lived experiences when privacy and digital living collide.

I have enjoyed getting to know my readers and fellow True/Slanters, and I know our digital bonds will live on. After all, the Web means never forgetting. And I think that’s a good thing.

Do not worry, faithful readers. The Not-So Private Parts will continue on. Details forthcoming. In the meantime, please keep in touch by friending me on Facebook or LinkedIn, or following me on Twitter. I would give you my cell phone number, but that’s gone poorly before.

A special thanks to Lewis, Coates, Michael, Andrea, Steve, and Roger for imagining and creating a tremendous space for writers and readers.

Photo from Gawker

Ryan Tate at Gawker decided to sic a paparazzi on the man who brought an end to online privacy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, over a long weekend. You can check out the photo shoot here. The photos must be a bit old because he still has his iPhone in them, and I noted yesterday that he’s moved on to the Android.

You may find the photos a little disappointing. Like my experience lurking in the life of a fellow New Yorker, Gawker’s biggest discovery is that Zuckerberg is not actually very interesting. At the end of the day, most people are pretty boring… which may be the best privacy protection we have.

Image by Getty Images North America via @daylife

Mark Zuckerberg may be regretting his decision to keep his Facebook profile privacy settings so low.

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced in a status message that his new iPhone wasn’t rocking his world. He wrote on his Facebook wall, “This week I got an iPhone. This weekend I got four chargers so I can keep it charged everywhere I go and a land line so I can actually make phone calls.” He added in a comment that his old Blackberry hurt his thumbs, and that he would switch to iPhone 4 or to the Android.

Ryan Tate at Gawker wrote a post about the update: Facebook CEO Disses iPhone (which got over 100K views). Tate is a close follower of Zuck’s page, having also picked up a video the CEO was tagged in, of him “icing” one of his employees.

Zuck has since made good on his promise and purchased an Android, if his Facebook wall is to be believed:

But he may not want that reported. The man who has allegedly said he doesn’t believe in privacy seems a bit irked about his loss of privacy…

Zuckerberg appeared to regret his oversharing, and later got rid of the iPhone-dissing post (by deleting it or making it private), as noted by Geek.com. It appears Zuckerberg didn’t want to knock a fellow tech giant quite so publicly.

A friend of Zuckerberg’s posted a Techcrunch article about the story, leading to an annoyed comment from Zuckerberg:

Regarding that last comment — happy to fulfill your prophecy.

The CEO may object to the close coverage of his tech toy reviews, but he doesn’t mind continuing to publicize his “Bros icing Bros” activities. He has not asked his friend to privatize/take down the icing video, starring him that garnered Gawker’s attention, and when he got iced by his UK Sales Team later that month, he was happy to tell the world about it.

Slamming Smirnoff Ices doesn’t necessitate privacy. Slamming the iPhone does.

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, several of the privacy thinkers that I follow on Twitter tweeted a piece on Slashdot about a big change at Facebook:

Facebook have quietly added the ability to delete you account. ‘Deactivate Account’, under Account Setting, has become ‘Deactivate or Delete Account’, and when checked it purports to permanently delete your account and all information you have shared. Facebook is actually willing to erase your data permanently? They must be counting on very few people doing so.

People seemed quite excited about this. As Nick O’Neill put it on AllFacebook, the “Web [went] crazy.”

Apparently, they overreacted…

I checked my “Deactivate Account” page and it was the same as always, with little photos of my friends telling me they would miss me. I checked in with a spokesperson, who told me:

We’re constantly testing new ideas, including placement of various features. One of these recent tests included variations of the delete account option for a small percentage of people. It’s very likely you aren’t part of the test.

Why anyone would delete their Facebook account is beyond me. It’s part of the new world people; embrace it. Well, unless you’re dating multiple people and don’t want them to know about each other — a novel reason for not having a Facebook account that was shared with me recently.

If you are currently spending your nights with a bevy of attractive people, here’s the lowdown on deleting your account — a topic that came up in an interesting talk about online privacy on the New York Times Bits blog. When you delete your account, you have two weeks to change your mind (just in case one of those flings develops into a monogamous relationship). And in fact, you’ve always had the option to “permanently delete” all your data.

A Facebook spokesperson told me a couple months ago with regards to the long-standing “Deactivate Account” option:

We wait 14 days between receiving the request from the user and deleting the account. Since deletion is irreversible, this allows people who mistakenly submitted a request to let us know before their information is deleted. It also give us time to send an email notification to the account owner in the event that the request was made maliciously by someone who has access to the person’s login credentials. After the 14 days are up, the account is deleted. Personally identifying information is purged, and the account can’t be reactivated or restored.

I then asked whether the information completely disappears or whether it stays on Facebook’s servers somewhere, like a ghost that’s not publicly accessible:

When a photo or video is deleted, or when a person deletes his or her account, we delete all of the metadata for the content as well as any and all tagging and linking information. For all practical purposes, the photo or video no longer exists, and we wouldn’t be able find it if we were asked or even compelled to do so. This is similar to what happens when you delete information from the hard drive of your computer. Technically, the bits that make up the photo persist somewhere, but, again, the photo is impossible to find.

If you do want to commit Facebook suicide, you can do that here. Though if you keep reading the NSPP, I will keep trying to talk you off that digital ledge.

In fact, it felt like he ripped quite a few pages from Solove’s 2007 book, “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet.” Rosen’s message was a condensed version of that book — essentially, that it’s scary that it can be so difficult to control the information disseminated about ourselves online, and that we as a society need to come up with ways to protect people. That would be protection from the reputation ruining that comes from someone tagging you in a nasty blog post and having it turn up as the first result in a Google search of your name, but also protecting people from themselves in this age of indiscreet Facebooking and Tweetaholicism.

The piece went online early last week, and many people sent it my way. When I opened it and it started with the “drunken pirate” anecdote, I closed my browser and decided to wait until the magazine came to my house on Saturday. I decided that if the article was using an anecdote from four years ago as its hook, it could wait a few days to be read.

I enjoyed the piece, but in many ways, it felt as dated as that lead.

Most people know the story of Stacy Snyder, a Pennsylvania woman who was kicked out of teaching training due to a drunken photo on Facebook in which she was dressed as pirate. The world of digital living is changing rapidly, and that particular story feels old to me. One big change since the mid-aughts is that being seen in drunken photos is becoming more acceptable. Rosen mentions this briefly at the end of his piece through an interview with a psychology professor at the University of Texas:

[Samuel] Gosling is optimistic about the implications of his study for the possibility of digital forgiveness. He acknowledged that social technologies are forcing us to merge identities that used to be separate — we can no longer have segmented selves like “a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self.” But although he told Facebook, “I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self,” he also suggested that as all of us have to merge our public and private identities, photos showing us having a few drinks on Facebook will no longer seem so scandalous. “You see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he’s not a good accountant. We’re coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.”

In today’s world, teachers do have a few drinking photos on their Facebook page, and they probably won’t get fired over them. That initial backlash against seeing people’s non-professional sides is fading.

Rosen reaffirmed something else for me in his piece — the beauty of having access to all of this information about people as a way of effectively judging them. Rather than having to work with and get to know people over time, we really can just look at their Facebook profile for a rather accurate measure of how we present ourselves offline.

In other words, you are who you are online:

Samuel Gosling, the University of Texas, Austin, psychology professor who conducted the study, told the Facebook blog, “We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees him or herself and how that profile owner’s friends see the profile owner.”

By comparing the online profiles of college-aged people in the United States and Germany with their actual personalities and their idealized personalities, or how they wanted to see themselves, Gosling found that the online profiles conveyed “rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.” (Personality impressions based on the online profiles were most accurate for extroverted people and least accurate for neurotic people, who cling tenaciously to an idealized self-image.)

Rosen laments the accumulation of information about us online and our inability to escape it. Reading that makes me think of what it must have been like when cars became ubiquitous and lovers of horse-drawn carriages lamented this new mechanization of traveling. We live in a faster world with greater access to information, and greater means to control it in some ways.

The publishing platform of the Web is open to us all. Before, if you were written about in a news article (*Ahem*), that piece determined your reputation and how you were perceived and you really had no means to weigh in on it yourself. Now, you can respond to that which is inaccurate in cyberspace. In fact, there are professional services devoted to controlling your Google search results — Rosen namechecks ReputationDefender, one of the most successful of these.

I realize I have a unique perspective on this, being a professional online writer. I’m constantly spinning my name out into the Web and have a very public presence because of the nature of my job. But society is moving in a direction where we will all have online presences of some sort. And studies show that young people are getting good at managing that presence. See Pew’s recent study on this:

More than half (57%) of adult internet users say they have used a search engine to look up their name and see what information was available about them online, up from 47% who did so in 2006. Young adults, far from being indifferent about their digital footprints, are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. For example, more than two-thirds (71%) of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online.

Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many internet users, especially the young. While some internet users are careful to project themselves online in a way that suits specific audiences, other internet users embrace an open approach to sharing information about themselves and do not take steps to restrict what they share.

Rosen notes that we don’t have perfect control over how we’re viewed. But I would say that in fact, we never have had that complete control. And I see great value in our ability to gather more information about one another, and to share more information about ourselves. I’m not alone:

“Search engines and social media sites now play a central role in building one’s identity online,” said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and lead author of the report, “Many users are learning and refining their approach as they go–changing privacy settings on profiles, customizing who can see certain updates and deleting unwanted information about them that appears online.”

When compared with older users, young adults are more likely to restrict what they share and whom they share it with. “Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities,” said Madden.

via Reputation Management and Social Media | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

One solution that Rosen presents is destroying data: setting expiration dates on pieces of information so that it disappears. I may be an online radical, but that sounded to me like a digital equivalent of Fahrenheit 451 — “let’s set things afire to maintain control.”

My reaction to the piece echoed that of my friend and colleague, David Lat, with whom I often meld minds. He wrote (on both Facebook and Twitter, of course), “David Lat doesn’t HATE privacy, but he does think (1) it’s overrated and (2) all the hand-wringing over the erosion of privacy is simply ANNOYING (just shut up and deal already).”

His advice (and mine): “(1) Live your life as publicly as possible, and (2) teach yourself to care less about your reputation.”

In that, there is another nugget: care less about the reputations of others as presented online. If you see a drunken photo of someone, you don’t have to fire them over it.

Britney Spears is the most popular person on Twitter

Last night at an East Village bar with two of my journo friends, we talked about our favorite celebrity tweeps. My favorite is Roger Ebert (@EbertChicago) — though some might argue that Ebert is a fellow journo, not a “celebrity.” He has excellent Twitter taste in both links and retweets, and is pithily wise. I’m also a fan of Conan O’Brien, who doesn’t tweet often but always tweets funny (@ConanOBrien).

One of my friends favors Mindy Kaling of The Office (@mindykaling). She’s humorous and a big basketball fan. The other friend drools over John Cusack’s dreamy tweets (who used to have the handle @shockozulu but has now converted to the more banal @johncusack).

None of these are the most popular celebrity tweeps. Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, and Lady Gaga top that list. Sorry to break it to her fans, but reading her twitter feed, I think Spears may have hired a six-year-old to ghost-tweet for her.

This morning, I was thinking about what it is we derive from being able to follow and interact virtually with “famous people” we respect/admire/hate/love/obsess over.

Ta-Nehisi Coates touched on this yesterday in the Atlantic in a post on KingJames, though his focus was more on what the celebrities derive:

A measure of how different things are nowadays was James [LeBron's] decision, shortly before his Decision, to join Twitter. We have unparalleled access to movie stars, athletes, politicians, etc. They seem more approachable than in days bygone, even if we are merely one of thirty-thousand, following a brand. And so we have new ways of imagining ourselves within this constellation of stars. We can like each other; we can bask in some approximation of “friendship.” A politician comes across as just another guy, a rapper seems like someone with whom you could hang out. Perhaps, like Kanye West, who attended James’ Decision party, they’re just misunderstood and their blog-their ALL CAPS direct line to the people-lets them really be who they want to be. There is a value to being merely “likable” in this sense, to being “cool” enough to inspire a random person to click a link. A few thousand people liking something in unison, a band of followers skimming your 140-character missives: brands have been built upon less.

via Random Thoughts on LeBron and Social Networking – Culture – The Atlantic.

Twitter, Facebook, and blogs allow celebrities to make themselves more accessible and seem like “normal people,” and at the same time, allow normal people to make themselves more visible and “known” like celebrities. At what point do those two things converge and eliminate unique celebrities all together?

Some celebrities, like Ebert, became celebrities because they have very interesting things to say. Getting to be part of their daily conversation on Twitter is a bit of thrill. With other celebs, like Lady Gaga, I think the act of following is simply a declaration of “I like what you do.” Twitter is a nice free way of consuming the person and their output, what Coates calls their brand.

Of course, in the course of sharing, some celebs may hurt their brands by killing their mystique.

In the meanwhile, are there any celeb tweeps you recommend @kashhill follow for wisdom, laughs, or mystique-killing?

For a long time, that’s kind of how the Internet has been: fairly anonymous gatherings with little emphasis on identification or regulation. But some would like to take the party to a bar. Blizzard, a gaming company that offers World of Warcraft, tried this month to make it a bar where everyone knows your name. Whereas the U.S. Cyberczar is just trying to ensure that everyone has to show ID to get in. The Cyberczar’s plan seems to be the more successful one, or at least the one causing far less public uproar…

Blizzard’s announcement earlier this month of a “Real ID” program, forcing its players to use their real names on forums, was met with a fierce public outcry. True/Slant’s Paul Tassi wrote an excellent piece on the tensions inherent in the proposal:

“I have to be honest, my first, initial, unadulterated reaction to this news was glee. Why? For years now, I’ve been writing with my real name for the various media outlets I work for including this one, and in return for expressing my ideas and having them attached to my own name (in on True/Slant, face), I’ve been endlessly flamed with personal insults from commenters hiding under the veil of a fake username and e-mail address,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem fair that I put myself out there every day with my writing, only to routinely be torn down by anonymous idiots who I have no recourse against. I’ve long dreamed of an internet utopia where everyone is responsible for what they say, leading to a much more civilized discourse overall.”

But then he goes on to outline all of the potential problems of real identities in the fanatical, emotionally-charged world of online gaming, primarily focusing on real world consequences of gaming conflicts and obsessions, and the stigma attached to gaming (‘no job offer for you, weird, obsessive WoW player!’). Tassi came out against Real ID, as did most people on the Web. One anonymous player went so far as to create a blog, A Snowstorm By Any Other Name, to protest the program by posting personal details about Blizzard executives and employees, gathered from online forums:

This is purely to say: Hey, this guy (who can afford to pay professionals to keep his personal information private) says that we have nothing to worry about with people knowing our real names. Well, here’s what is available on him even after a good internet scrubbing. Here’s what’s available on just a couple of his employees. There are people out there in much worse situations (witness protection, former abusive relationships, BEING FEMALE ON WORLD OF WARCRAFT, people who don’t want to risk losing a job because it’s public that they play WoW, etc) that would be utterly fucked if there was a slip-up and their names were revealed

via What’s in a name?.

The anti-Real IDers won. Blizzard backed down, though it will implement a program that suggests people connect with their real world friends — it sounds a lot like Facebook’s Friend Suggestions. The World of Warcraft just wasn’t up to fighting the battle against anonymity online.

The U.S. Cyberczar may have a bit more firepower though. The Department of Homeland Security recently released a draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. The plan is not “fully baked;” public comments are due today, though some privacy groups have begged for an extension.

Excerpt from draft plan

It’s a big deal. The U.S. government is trying to find a way to make commercial transactions safer online, and to ensure that people are who they say they are before accessing financial data and medical records. The government, though, is sensitive to that which torpedoed the Blizzard plan — the call for privacy. This is an even more sensitive issue when Big Brother is involved. The idea of a government tracking chip attached to one’s online identity would freak out even non-conspiracy theorists.

The plan dances around that concern throughout the 40 page document [PDF] describing a happier, safer online world, called “The Identity Ecosystem.” (Blogger Identity Woman has a nice read-through and comment on the plan here.) It’s been deemed an “ecosystem” because it would not be a government-run one-stop Internet shop. The plan envisions an online world with various layers of identity, authenticated by private actors and corporations. The Gov wants to push for a better protection for our personal information against cybercriminals.

From the idyllic draft:

There are various causes of the online fraud and identity theft identified in the statistics above. Out- of-date software, unsafe web browsing habits, or lack of appropriate anti-virus systems can all lead to the compromise of computer systems. Criminals and other adversaries often exploit weak identity solutions for individuals, websites, email, and the infrastructure that the Internet utilizes. The poor identification, authentication, and authorization practices associated with these identity solutions are the focus of this Strategy.

Further, the online environment today is not user-centric; individuals tend to have little control over their own personal information. They have limited ability to utilize a single digital identity across multiple applications. Individuals also face the increasing complexity and inconvenience associated with managing the large number of user accounts, passwords, and other identity credentials required to conduct services online with disparate organizations. The collection of identity-related information across multiple providers and accounts, coupled with the sharing of personal information through the growth of social media, increases opportunities for data compromise. For example, personal data used to recover lost passwords (e.g., mother’s maiden name, the name of your first pet, etc.) is often publicly available.

So, how do you keep the criminal element out of the party? The New York Times explains:

The idea is to create a federation of private online identity systems. Users could select which system to join, and only registered users whose identities have been authenticated could navigate those systems. The approach contrasts with one that would require a government-issued Internet driver’s license. (Civil liberties groups oppose a government system, fearful that it could lead to national identity cards.)

Google and Microsoft are among companies that already have these “single sign-on” systems that make it possible for users to log in just once but use many different services.

In effect, the approach would create a “walled garden” in cyberspace, with (virtually) safe neighborhoods and bright (cyber) streetlights to establish a sense of a trusted community.

via Taking the Mystery Out of Web Anonymity – NYTimes.com.

I talked to Heather West of the Center for Democracy & Technology about the plan. She said it may be more accurate to think of it as a layer on top of the Web as opposed to a walled garden. “My biggest concern is that [the plan] doesn’t address how you create an identity ecosystem that is both effective and respective of personal identity and data,” said West. “And that it doesn’t address the government layer.”

There have been 476 suggestions made in the online solicitation for public comment. The two most popular ones call for a decreased centralization of our online identities (which makes them easier to steal) and better education of consumers (people are stupid in their Internet activity and don’t take advantage of existing safeguards).

The government is currently running some pilot programs exploring identity certification online, and will likely release a final “Identity Ecosystem” plan — incorporating public comment — in the early winter. We’ll see if it gets a more Blizzard-like response then.

Should General Stanley A. McChrystal have been read his rights before being interviewed?

“I should have realized you were going to quote me. The concept of being prepared for everything you write to be viewed by the world is really starting to hit home for me.”

That’s a message I received from someone I wrote about recently. We had gone back and forth by email about a story, and then when I published it, I quoted parts of the discussion.

People are wary of talking to journalists. When they do overcome their fears and talk to us reporterly types, they are often taken by surprise when they see their words in print. Phrases sound different when cut off from their paragraphical pack and presented naked and alone in quotation marks.

I read of one journalist who starts every interview by quoting from Janet Malcolm’s Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Perhaps if Michael Hastings had started his Rolling Stone interview with General McChrystal this way, McChrystal would have been more taciturn around him. Or at least would not have gone bar-hopping with him.

Malcolm compares the journalistic-source relationship to a romantic one, with both the journalist and the source attempted to seduce one another: The journalist wants information and the source wants to control the story.

Given my legal blogger glasses, I see the the world of journalism as being more similar to the world of law. Like officers of the court, we do research, interviews, and fact-finding to build a case. Whereas they use the information to press charges or sue, we write a story about it. Given that, I suggest that journalists should also offer “Miranda warnings” before interrogations…

I’ve been on the other side of this. When a New York Times reporter called me as a source for a Style section story, I wasn’t very happy about how it turned out.

So as both an officer a journalist and a source, I would suggest the following “Miranda warning” for journalists to offer before interviewing someone for a story:

You have the right to answer my questions or to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used in my story. You have the right to request that this interview be on background or off the record. If you don’t know what that means, read this Wikipedia article. You have the right to tape record this interview, though I may just take notes. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you? Great. First question…

Image from fake website

The Internet is dangerous in the hands of some deranged individuals. The law student who put my details into a Craigslist casual encounters ad struck again this month.

This time he lashed out against a female lawyer who refused to hire him. He created a fake website for her law office, hoping to wreak havoc on her Google results. Ironically, he labels her the Internet predator.

After I wrote about the fake website (but didn’t link it so as not to improve its page ranking) at Above the Law, the law school student took the site down (Yay for service journalism!), perhaps because of my pointing out that he was probably violating defamation and criminal harassment laws.

Apparently he wasn’t paying attention in his criminal law class.