Emails.
Our projects goal was to determine which kinds of sites tend to sell email information, and to contrast that data with common perceptions ("Facebook would never do anything like sell my email...").
The Stalking Project
Within contemporary society, it has become more common and socially acceptable to expose personal information online. This personal information might be anything that can be used to identify a person, such as age, gender, name, marital status, hometown, pictures, family members etc. However, most would like to avoid unwanted contact with those that could potentially harass or harm them with said information.
1984, the novel, in the Real World
Our project is a research project comparing government surveillance in China, the United States, and the fictitional Oceania from the novel 1984. China and the fictitional Oceania are widely understood to be authoritarian states, the United States prides itself on being "the land of the free." What we found was that what is widely understood is the United States is not as different as imagined and that widespread surveillance typical of totalitarian societities is taking place in the United States.
Bot-A-Fett
Project Case Statement: This project focuses on Copyright laws regarding videos on Youtube in order to better conceptualize protection of intellectual property.
Project Problem Statement: Companies have a right to their own material. How can Youtube improve their methodology in which they employ to regulate copyright infringement?
CryptoParty (Ethics)
Project Summary: In collaboration with the other CryptoParty group, the three members of the Ethics team disseminated information about how to use and access different encryption techniques. While this was the main goal of the EFF conference booth, the Ethics team was responsible for mentioning how software such as Tor grants the user much more freedom to explore the "shallow" and "deep" internet, without fear of being surveilled.
UO Privacy Policy
Project Case Statement:
This project focuses on the reading and analysis of the UO Privacy Policy in order to better conceptualize online privacy at the university.
Project Problem Statement
Students agree to the University's online privacy policy, usually, without even understanding what they are agreeing to. What are we students actually agreeing to when we use the University's network and what ambiguities exist within that could be more precise?
Experiment Statement:
Facebook: Creepy Stalker or Brilliant Advertiser?
Project Description: We created ten fake Facebook accounts to see how "likes" and friends would affect advertising. After some initial difficulties, we discovered that Facebook only advertises when a user has either friends or a location. Other interesting results include one of the accounts receiving friend requests from real people and another account being discovered by Facebook as a fake. This experiment led to us to question the right Facebook has to use personal information for the sake of advertising.
Creepbook
Case statement: This project focuses on how easy it is to access other's personal information through social networking sites, and also how readily people give their information out to others, in order to better conceptualize true online privacy.
The Private I
To begin, here is a link to the blog we have created http://theprivatei48.wordpress.com/. The blog is a work in progress and should have several more posts by the end of the weekend.
Below is our problem statement and project hypothesis.
Project Problem Statement: