Category: Social issues involving home computing

Article

How to kill a troll | Naked Security (Sophos)

My Comments

Anyone who has a personal Internet presence on a message board, social network or similar environment or operates such a presence for their company or other organisation can end up facing the worst side of the Internet.

This is typically in the form of the “Internet trolls” who exist on message boards, social networks, blog comment trails and online chat rooms just to cause trouble. This has manifested in online harassment which is mainly in the form of schoolyard-grade activity like foul names or targeted embarrassment attempts. But there have been acts like physical threats against person, animal and property; stalking, sustained harassment and sexual harassment with young women being the main victims.

It included a situation that I faced regarding a café I regularly visited where their Facebook presence was tarnished with foul comments because the business didn’t permit a protest group to put some flyers about their campaign by their cash register. Here, I was defending the café in their stance regarding what had happened.

But what can you do? You could block the accounts where the behaviour is coming and implement technological measures that do this for you. Here, such measures work on logic like blocking relatively young accounts that mention you, accounts with very few followers that mention you or accounts that generate replies containing certain keywords.

On the other hand, you could embarrass the source of the comments. This plays on various analogies associated with social taboos like in-workplace sexual harassment where a person isn’t just hauled up before law courts but the court of public opinion doesn’t look favourably on them. This would be hard to implement in the online world due to the ease in which one can create an anonymous online presence such as with the use of multiple disposable emails or pseudonyms.

Some countries like the UK have given their online-harassment laws more teeth such as legislating for longer prison terms. To the same extent, we should be encouraged to use all of the civil and criminal laws available to us as a tool to deal with Internet trolls, but a key problem is working with the problem from a cross-jurisdictional angle. This is where you identify that the activity is appearing from another state within the same country in the case of countries like Germany, Australia and USA, or another country; such as someone residing in the UK being harassed by someone using a computer located in New York State in the USA.

As well, there have been various PR activities to pillory the trolls such as Mary Beard’s activity after being victimised by schoolyard-grade online behaviour. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind on British TV and had her friends and supporters work together to “fight back” against the troublemakers. Businesses and organisations who have been “got at” by trolls can use their loyal support base who have an active online presence such as their regular customers to work together for this same goal. 

Let’s not forget that the channels that exist to report trouble on a social network, bulletin board, chat forum or the like do exist for you to report this kind of trouble.

Personally, I would encourage any campaign to crack down on Internet trolling to be done as a group of many people. They can pool resources and use their contacts to work together to defend the people who are being affected or make life hard for the troublemakers. This can manifest in using technological tools to limit their effect on the affected forums, using civil and criminal legal action against the troublemakers or use online and offline public-relations efforts with a view to pillory them.

Sometimes some disturbing situations that happen with social networking, Internet forums, instant messaging and the like may require you to simply ignore or block trouble on the Internet but others may require you to work actively against it.

Article

Doncare launches LiveFree App to fight domestic violence | The Weekly Review

From the horse’s mouth

Doncare Community Services

Press Release (PDF)

Facebook Page

App Site (iTunes App Store)

My Comments

Doncare Community Services, along with Doncaster Rotary Club, have just launched an iPhone app that provides information about domestic and relationship violence. This provides the general information that women need to know about handling these situations along with knowledge of legal and similar resources they can avail themselves of.

A typical situation that concerns online domestic-violence resources is that these resources are typically furnished as Web pages which can yield a privacy risk for the victim of this violence due to the fact that Web browsers list what you have browsed. This is a key risk for  lot of these victims who live in a highly-controlled abusive relationship. Here, the perpetrator is often likely to check on recent Web-browsing activity that the person has done on the computer equipment used in their home as part of wanting to know what they think and do as well as whom they see. These people even have to do this browsing from their workplace’s computer, a friend’s computer or a publicly-accessible computer like one installed in a library or café.

The native mobile app has the advantage that they can download the app from the platform’s app store, use it and delete it quickly if they fear that the perpetrator is snooping around their phone. Then they re-download the app from the app store as and when they can.

One limitation about this app is that it is focused on resources and legal options that are available and relevant to Victoria, Australia. An improvement that I would have would be to download information about options available in other jurisdictions, something that can be provided during the setup phase or at a later point. This effort could be positioned as part of a localisation effort that would take place during the app’s lifecycle.

At least this is an example of what can be done by family-violence support organisations regarding using the smartphone and tablets that people own. This is where a free, easily-downloaded, easily-uninstalled app that has this critical information and access to critical resources can be used as a tool by people who are at risk.

Article

INFOGRAPHIC: Suicide Prevention Resources On Facebook – AllFacebook

My Comments

I have previously covered the issue of Facebook in relation to the difficult topic of suicide and self-harm with an article about some incidents where a Facebook user sought assistance to handle a suicide attempt across the other side of the world; as well as another drawing attention to teenagers using this service as a counselling resource to reach out to other at-risk teens.

Now Facebook have taken it upon themselves to provide resources to help users worried about a person who is at risk of self-harm or suicide. This is more so where a Facebook status update becomes something to vent one’s feelings as I have seen before many times.

Here, they have exposed these resources and what they can do by showing an infographic flow-chart (PDF) about what they can do to help the user who is worried about their friend. They are exposing this flow-chart using a series of public-service announcements that appear across the Website so everyone who is using Facebook is aware of the resource.

This is in addition to partnering with organisations like Lifeline and Samaritans as well as implementing protocols and procedures to handle these situations especially where it happens in another country. One of the actions can include Facebook drawing the affected person’s attention to their local resources as well as keeping the concerned friend “in the loop” through a special Web dashboard.

As well, they have made a “one-touch” reference list of these organisations in their online help so that anyone across the Internet can be aware of these resources.

What I see of this is that Facebook, due to the sheer number of regular users, has done the right thing to handle this situation and this could open up questions amongst Internet-based online communities about how to handle situations where a person expresses a desire to harm themselves through these communities.

Article

Teens meet on Facebook to talk about suicide

My Comments

I have often heard remarks about the negative influence of Facebook and other social networks on teenagers’ lives and how they use these services. But this article has highlighted how a group of teenagers have used this service to reach out to teenagers on this sensitive topic by setting up an open group which can act as a forum on this topic.

They took the fact that nearly every teenager has Facebook presence and they often vent their feelings on their Facebook Wall as I have seen before. This group effectively became a forum to raise a subject that is normally considered taboo. I had a look at the forum and there were even images and referenced to people who have lost people that were close to them in this manner.

I would like to see this group exposed not just to Australian media but to worldwide media because this isn’t just an Australian issue but a worldwide issue.

For further help on this topic, I have published a list of some of the organisations looking in to the suicide and depression issue but there will be a similar organisation operation close to you.

Another increasingly-popular social network service is Twitter. This was intended as a “microblogging” service but some people have been implementing it as another social network.

Like the similar Facebook article that I have written for Facebook novices, this will list who will see which information you post when you use Twitter. Here, I would recommend this as a bookmark or favourite or as something to print out and keep near the computer or have available on the business intranet.

Twitter lexicon

Who sees what

What to do where on Twitter

If someone follows you on your Twitter account, it may be a good idea to check that person out when you receive the notification by email. Here, you could then consider following that person and being able to use direct messaging as appropriately.

It is also worth noting that a lot of social Twitter users use “textspeak” (abbreviations and acronyms for common expressions used when sending SMS messages) when they send out Tweets. So you may have to use resources like the Urban Dictionary to help you understand some of this lingo.

Facebook started it. Windows Live Photo Gallery has implemented it since the 2010 version and made it easier with the 2011 version.

What is people-tagging

The feature I am talking about here is the ability to attach a metadata tag that identifies a particular person that appear in a digital image. These implementations typically have the tag applied to a specific area of the photo, usually defining the face or head of the person concerned. It will also become available in current or up-and-coming versions of other image-management programs, photo-sharing services, DLNA media servers and the like.

In the case of DLNA media servers, one of these programs could scan an image library and make a UPnP AV content-directory “tree” based on the people featured in one’s photo library.

Initially the concept, especially the Facebook implementation, was treated with fear and scorn because of privacy invasion. This is because this implementation allows the metadata to be related to particular Facebook Friends and also allows the photo to be commented on by other Facebook Friends. Now the Windows Live Photo Gallery application attaches this metadata in a standardised XML form to the JPEG file like it does with the description tags and geotags. There is the ability to make a copy of this file without the metadata for use in posting to Internet services.

A relevant implementation idea

One key benefit that I would see with this data when implemented with electronic picture frames, HDTVs and similar devices is the ability to overlay the tags over the picture when it is shown. This could be achieved by the user pressing a “display” or similar button on the device or its remote control. Devices with touchscreens, stylus-operated tablet screens or other pointer-driven “absolute” navigation setups could support a function that shows a “people tag” as you touch areas of the image.

Benefit to Alzheimers sufferers

Here, this feature could help people who suffer from Alzheimer’s or other dementia-related illnesses by helping them remember whom their family members or friends are. If the user is using an image-management program or DLNA media-server setup capable of using these tags, they can call up a collection of images of the person they think of and have those images appearing on the screen. If the device has a communications-terminal function like a telephone, one of the images can be used as an index image to remember the correspondent by. This function could be extended by the use of an automatically-updated index image or a screenshow that shows “key” images of the person.

Improving on the idea

To make this work, there needs to be an industry standard that defines how the people-tag metadata is stored on the JPEG file. As well, the standard has to support functions like one or more separate “nickname” fields for each of the people that can be displayed as an option.  This is because a person may be known to one or more other people via a nickname or relative-shortcut name (Mummy, Daddy, Nonna, etc).

Another issue is to encourage users to establish consistency whenever they tag up a collection of images. This could be achieved through “batch-tagging” and / or improved facial recognition in image-management tools. This may be an issue if two or more people are tagging images from their own collections to serve a third collection and they know the people via different names.

Conclusion

Once we cut through the hysteria surrounding people-tagging with digital images and focus on using it as part of desktop image-management systems rather than social networks, we can then see it as a tool for helping people remember whom their loved ones are.

I have been approached by Facebook newbies (novices) about messages that they write or read as part of their Facebook sessions and have thought about publishing this “at-a-glance” guide about who sees what you write. Feel free to print this off and pin it near your computer or keep the permalink as a ready URL on your browser’s Favourites / Bookmarks or intranet page. Nowadays the Facebook Wall is referred to as a Timeline but still serves the same purpose.

When I write here on Facebook, who sees it?

Where should I write this in Facebook?

Free PDF file of this information sheet available here to print or copy to your smartphone, tablet or e-reader.

Printing hints: Print each page on separate sheets for attaching to a wall or noticeboard near the computer, or print using your printer’s automatic duplex function for use as a page to keep in a loose-leaf reference folder.