A Consuming Experience

Sunday, 18 April 2010

What App?: security & privacy ratings of applications; tools to protect privacy

Before downloading and installing a new application, whether on your computer, Facebook, iPhone or Android or other smartphone, you can now check reviews of web and mobile apps for their privacy, security and openness.

Reviews on the What App site, by a team of about 15 lawyers, computer scientists, and privacy and security experts from Stanford University and other institutions, were recently thrown open to all visitors (who can request as well as post reviews). "Think Consumer Reports blended with Wikipedia and Yelp, but focused on the narrow issue of Internet security and privacy."

The site also reviews web browsers like Firefox and Safari, social networks including Twitter and Facebook and mobile platforms like Apple's iPhone, Windows Mobile and Google's Android.

According to the Stanford news item, "The reviews come in the form of written comments and badges that award applications up to five green bars for privacy, security and openness. Wikis accompany the reviews to summarize what the app does, and the site immediately serves up a list of links to news stories about an app's privacy and security issues.

The site also allows app developers to sign in and write notes about the privacy and security of their creations."

Check out the most privacy-friendly applications on What App? - including tools to help protect or enhance your privacy online.

How to increase your online popularity - blog, Twitter, Facebook: just post more, research says! - & my new experiment

A tip: to make your blog (or social media posts e.g. on Twitter, Facebook) more popular and attractive, to be liked more and get more visitors and friends online, it seems it's quantity not quality that counts.

According to recent research undertaken on Livejournal blogs by associate lecturer Susan Jamison-Powell at Sheffield Hallam University (who I think is @mooglove on Twitter based on basic searching!), the more words contributed, the more attractive the person is considered.

She said "The strongest factor was found to be the total number of words they had contributed over the week. It's not surprising then that we also found that the quantity of material a person had contributed was linked to their network size. Again the people who contributed the most had the most friends in their network."

But the actual tone of the posts (whether negative or positive) had no effect at all!

It seems "the popularity of online participants was to do with their activity within a social media community and not the tone of their posts".

(Seen in a New Scientist news item. And more info is in the Sheffield Hallam press release and BPS release. Also covered in the Telegraph.)

OK, I'm now going to conduct an experiment. I'll be tweeting more (I'm @improbulus on Twitter). In the past I've tended not to tweet unless I felt I had something useful or interesting to say, or was chatting to friends, as I really didn't think anyone would want to know what I've had for breakfast. And I've not cared about how many followers I do (or rather don't!) have, either.

But I'm going to try tweeting more for a few weeks, just to test Jamison-Powell's research. I'd post more here on this ACE Blogger blog, but I actually prefer my blog posts to be useful, and writing even one of my posts takes more time than you might imagine, so we'll see.

Day 0 - I have 274 followers. I ask forgiveness in advance for the inane blatherings I am about to engage in. Follow me & prepare to be bored. But hey, as long as you like me more and think I'm more attractive, that's the point innit? :D

UPDATED - Yes, I gave up on this experiment. No time.. but really my followers didn't increase in the short period I was doing this. Not unexpected perhaps.

Thursday, 8 April 2010

GoogleSharing - fix certificate issue with update

If you've been using the excellent GoogleSharing privacy add-on for Firefox by Moxie Marlinspike, which helps protect your privacy when you're doing a search via Google, you may have noticed a problem with using it last week, with an error about "invalid security certificate" saying it's not trusted:

That was due to French registrar Gandi.net revoking the site's SSL certificate without prior notice or proper timely explanation.

So a tip: you can fix this problem and get GoogleSharing working properly again by upgrading to the latest version of the extension (even though Firefox doesn't notify you that an upgrade is available, that one worked for me).