12-Year-Old Sues School Over Facebook Privacy

By Melissa Daniels | Mon Mar 12, 2012 4:13 pm

A 12-year-old student is suing her school for demanding her Facebook password, escalating the growing debate over privacy and social media as profiles become public property.

The 12-year-old Minnesota student's school district demanded her passwords for Facebook and email in order to search her saved information. Her suit is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The suit comes as agencies, schools, and employers demand increasing access to Facebook profiles of students and employees at a rapid rate. Organizations are safeguarding against inflammatory content on social media sites, but how they handle the situation can potentially violate constitutional rights, raising questions on whether Facebook posts can be treated as public, or subject to search.

The case stems from two incidents from the girl's Facebook. In one post, she called a hall monitor "mean" and said she hated her. A screenshot of the post made its way to the district, and someone showed the postings to the principal, resulting in a detention sentence and an apology to the hall monitor.

A subsequent post calling out whoever turned in the screenshot resulted in an in-school suspension. In the second incident, a male student's parent come forward, claiming the students were having inappropriate discussions on Facebook.

Administrators then called the girl to surrender her passwords in front of a school counselor and a county sheriff's deputy, in order to check her postings and chat records. The girl's mother says the district did not ask for her consent before its request.

Schools are examining Facebook activity, so the network is no longer the perceived safe haven students think it is. However, they still use the site as a place to express views about their school that, while maybe offensive, are not necessarily incendiary or criminal. In this case, the ACLU says the school district violated the student's First and Fourth Amendments.

"Students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the school house gate," an ACLU spokesperson said in a statement. "The Supreme Court ruled on that in the 1970s, yet schools like Minnewaska seem to have no regard for the standard."

But the district says as more facts about the case come out it will be clear its actions were "reasonable and appropriate." Meanwhile, it "disputes the one-sided version of events set forth in the complaint written by the ACLU," according to a statement.

Social media profiles are an informal communications that are, at an increasingly rapid rate, treated as an extension of that person's beliefs, reputation and associated organizations. Employers, and colleges, demand access to profiles through friending an employee or staff member, a growing trend that puts profiles under the microscope.

The findings can lead to disaster if someone's posts cast an unflattering light, like the much-discussed case of Apple firing an employee over rants about the company on their private page.

Schools demanding access to Facebook activity could have a chilling effect on the speech of students to rant about their school. But beyond the immediate school setting, the case could set a precedent for more users to fire back at organizations who probe pages for details.

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Editorials & Opinion By Kat Asharya
The Justice Department approved the $4.5 billion purchase of over 4,000 Nortel patents to major Android rivals like Apple and RIM, guaranteeing no end in sight to the legal battles entangling the mobile industry.

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Facebook baits Twitter, Flipboard with Interest lists

Facebook has announced a new Interest lists feature, which allows users to collate their favourite people and subjects and turn the news feed into a 'personalised newspaper.'

The Interest lists functionality, which will roll out to users in the next couple of weeks, seems to take inspiration from Twitter lists and socially-themed magazines like the Flipboard app for iOS.

'Interests' are user-generated lists which bring together, for example, news from the Facebook Pages of every Premier League team or every tech news site into collective feeds.

Whenever those are lists are updated, the stories or posts will appear also in your main news feed, making it easier for you to catch-up on the news that matters to you.

People like you

"Interests feature public figures and Pages related to a particular topic, and are put together by people like you.

"The top stories from each interest appear in your news feed so you can scan interesting headlines or click through to read more posts," says Facebook software engineer Eric Faller.

When Facebook users subscribe to Interest Lists, that subject will appear on the left hand side of the page, beneath the Friends Lists functionality.

While you can already subscribe to lists created by fellow Facebookers, for a true personalised experience, it's probably best that you get in there and create your own.

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Why Give Up Facebook for Lent, or Ever?

Lent is in full swing, and so are the commitments to 40 days without Facebook. In this framework, Facebook use is seen as negative and an addiction. It becomes just another one to add to Americans' list of overindulgences, of things that push us away from each other and further into self.

'The idea of giving up Facebook for Lent goes with Internet use as addiction,' says Alexandra Samuels, who penned 'Plug In Better': A Manifesto' on The Atlantic. 'I think one of the things that we experience, certainly those who spend a significant amount of time online and especially on social media, is you develop this sort of porousness between self and other when you're constantly disclosing thoughts via Facebook, Twitter, email. The intellectual habit of writing your thoughts as you have them has become widespread. It is a distancing kind of experience.' But is that act an addiction, or just a byproduct of using social media?

Duluth-based freelance writer Felicia Schneiderhan decided to give up Facebook for Lent this year. She says that she didn't think too much about the decision, but that it's turned out to be pretty hard.

'I use it throughout the day just to check in,' Schneiderhan says. 'If I am online and I need a mental break, I'll just glance at it quickly.'

Like everything new, the first few days were the hardest because Facebook had transcended just a random, once-in-awhile kinda thing. It had become a habit.

'Last night my son was in bed, I was tired, I went to my computer and didn't want to do emails - I wanted to see Facebook,' she says. 'But I can't. I've been calling people more, like my brothers, but I've been missing events.'

The break from Facebook has helped Schneiderhan realize how much she actually uses Facebook for legitimate purposes, and has helped her rethink how to use it more effectively.

'Once Lent is over, I think I'm going to restrict my time to just once in the morning and once at night,' she says.

For Schneiderhan, Facebook is a useful tool and not an addiction. Yet there is still a cultural undertone which implies that Twitter, for instance, is as addictive as alcohol and cigarettes.

'Addiction has become this framework we use in our culture to contain and medicalize dysfunctional behavior,' says Samuels. 'So anytime you stop doing it, you will have withdrawl symptoms. You have to ask yourself, what do we eliminate and obscure by framing that behavior as addiction?'

Samuels suggests that this framework is indeed counterproductive because it purports that people should quit Facebook cold turkey. To Samuels, this sounds 'hopeless and counterproductive.' Instead, she offers some practical advice.

'Ask yourself: Is my use of the Internet helping me create the life I want? I think part of it is that people are not clear with what they're trying do with their life,' she says. 'If you get up from the computer on a regular basis and you wonder where the time went and you don't feel very good, maybe you should reassess your Internet use.'

But for those devoted to a Facebook-free 40 days of Lent, that's not going to happen. We're talking about the devout here.

'I'm doing it again this year,' writes Rosie Perera on the blog Faith and Technology. 'I'd been planning to just give up procrastination but one of my biggest ways of procrastinating is checking Facebook ('just one quick little check' and then I get sucked in), so I think that really needs to go too.'

Perera takes it one step further, suggesting that people who want to give it up actually deactivate their accounts. She files her blog post under the topic 'Tech Sabbath.'

But the idea of giving up Facebook completely may not really be a positive thing.

'When I go back to regular non-Lent Facebook usage, I wonder if I'll go back to my old pattern,' says Schneiderhan. 'I don't think Facebook is a bad habit to have, for me. And that's a good question because I thought it would be a huge time-waster.'

If you're still devoted to a Facebook-free Lent, be sure to check out the Pope's Twitter feed. He's tweeting Gospel themes or messages until Easter.

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Facebook: The Wimps Will Inherit the Data Center

Facebook hardware man Frank Frankovsky outside the company's new HQ -- aka the former home of onetime hardware giant Sun Microsystems (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired)

Unlike Google, Facebook believes the wimps have a future in the data center.

As various academics and free-thinking startups seek to reinvent the server using ultra-low-power processors — aka “wimpy cores” — Google continues to downplay the idea, and because it’s Google — the company that led a data-center revolution over the last several years — people are listening.

But Facebook is now leading a data-center revolution of its own, and the social networking giant cum hardware designer is rather high on the wimpy-core idea.

“I think it’s going to shake things up sooner than you think,” says Frank Frankovsky, the man who oversees Facebook’s effort to design its own servers and other data-center hardware.

The idea is to save power and space by building servers equipped with hundreds of processors not unlike the one in your iPhone. Rather than running your applications on traditional “brawny core” server chips, you break your software up into tiny pieces and spread them across a much larger number of “wimpy cores” — a “core” being a single microprocessor. Startups such as SeaMicro and Calxeda are actually stuffing hundreds of individual chips into each server, while another outfit, Tilera, is stuffing hundreds of cores into a single chip.

The wimpy-core movement is part of a larger effort to re-imagine hardware in the data center so that it’s suited to big-name web services and other operations that juggle unusually large amounts of data. Google was at the forefront of this movement, designing its own data centers and its own servers, and a big part of its philosophy was to break its software into pieces that could be run across a large array of servers. While other big businesses were using enormous monolithic servers to run their software, Google was using thousands of commodity machines equipped with commodity server chips.

In a way, Google pioneered the wimpy-core movement. But the company is believes there’s a limit to how wimpy your cores can be. As you spread your application thinner and thinner, says Google distinguished engineer Luiz André Barroso, the spreading gets harder and harder. And at a certain point, he argues, it’s just not worth it to go any further. “There’s easy parallelism, but then there’s harder parallelism,” Barroso recently told Wired. “There are some parts of a program that are trivial to chunk into pieces, that don’t necessarily have to interact with each other … but eventually you’ve exhausted this, and you have to go down to other pieces of the code that are hard to parallelize.”

The wimpy-core evangelists see Google’s point, but they don’t necessarily agree with it. SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman believes that Google takes this stance because its particular infrastructure isn’t suited to wimpy cores, and Dave Andersen — the Carnegie Melon professor who coined the “wimpy node” name — says much the same thing. Both acknowledge, however, that some applications must be heavily rewritten for wimpy codes, and that many others — not just Google’s — are completely unsuited to the setup. Because some potential customers were cold on the wimpy core idea, SeaMicro is now offering a version of its servers based on traditional Intel Xeon “brawny cores.”

At Facebook, engineers have been tracking the progress of wimpy-core hardware for years, including gear from SeaMicro and Tilera. According to Frankovsky, the social networking giant is “actively testing hardware from both these outfits, and the company has employees dedicated to working with such hardware makers, “making sure Facebook code can run on alternative technology” to Intel’s x86 instruction set, the technology used by today’s brawny cores.

Facebook has yet to adopt this hardware for its live service, in part because the hardware from companies such as SeaMicro and Tilera can’t handle as much memory as the massive social network requires. But the hardware makers are working to eliminate this restriction. “We’re getting very promising results on our tests,” Frankovsky says. “What we’re focused on when it comes to CPU selection — or really any selection [of hardware in the data center] — is what can deliver the most useful work per watt per dollar. If that comes from Intel or AMD or Tilera or an ARM vendor, it’s all good with me.”

Part of the problem with using wimpy cores is that you have to move far more information between cores, and that can bog things down. But Tilera’s hardware alleviates this problem by putting all the cores on a single chip, and Frankovsky points out that the problem goes away once you build new protocols for moving data between cores — something that Facebook and others are now working on as part of the Open Compute Project. Frankovsky acknowledges that there may be limits to the wimpy-core setup, but he says it’s too early to actually identify them. “At this point,” he says, “those limits are all theoretical.”

As Dave Andersen points out, some software “workloads” are suited to wimpy cores, and others are not. But when we asked which Facebook workloads might benefit from wimpy cores, Frank Frankovsky was unequivocal. “Within the Facebook environment, I haven’t seen a workload that would be exempted from wimpy cores,” he says. “But it’s all a matter of time.”

Cade Metz is the editor of Wired Enterprise. Got a NEWS TIP related to this story -- or to anything else in the world of big tech? Please e-mail him: cade_metz at wired.com.

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Facebook game star Zynga starts online playground

Facebook games star Zynga on Thursday unveiled an online playground where people can share passions for hit titles without having to visit the world's top social network.

Zynga.com will launch this month with CastleVille, Words With Friends, CityVille, Hidden Chronicles and Zynga Poker, along with a promise of lots more social games by the San Francisco-based firm and outside developers.

"We built Zynga.com to give our players more ways to connect with each other and play great social games whether built by Zynga or other talented developers," said Zynga founder and chief executive Mark Pincus.

"We look forward to bringing more play to the world on our platform."

Zynga played up its online games community as an expansion of its partnership with Facebook rather than a quest for more independence.

Zynga rose to success on the popularity of it titles at Facebook, where millions of people enlist friends in either collaborative or competitive online play ranging from poker to growing virtual crops or building cartoon cities.

Zynga.com will be connected to the Facebook "social graph" so game play and actions of friends involved will follow people between the online venues, Zynga general manager Manuel Bronstein told AFP.

"I see this as a great manifestation of our relationship with Facebook that goes deeper into gaming," Bronstein said.

"In the morning you may check your news or social feeds on Facebook and then play games, but late in the afternoon you might just want to play so you go to Zynga.com"

Along with keeping people connected with Facebook play companions, the Zynga website features ways to speed up progress in games and find "zFriends" who share one's passions for titles.

"The reality is that games I like my friends might not like, but there are strangers out there who might share my love for the games," Bronstein said.

"You can make zFriends to find what you need to level up quickly in games, and be able to keep your family pictures and personal history on Facebook private," he continued.

Zynga.com was also crafted as a platform on which third-party developers could make titles available to the 240 million people who play the company's games each month.

Zynga partners at launch included Mob Science and Row Sham Bow.

"As an independent game developer, we have faced significant challenges in getting players to discover our games," said Mob Science chief executive Michael Witz.

"The Zynga Platform provides an unparalleled opportunity by letting us focus on building a game that can easily be enjoyed by the millions of people on Zynga's network who already love to play social games."

Zynga.com will launch globally in coming weeks in 16 languages.

Zynga jumped into the stock market with a billion-dollar listing in December.

Offering 100 million shares -- one-seventh of the company's total -- at $10 a pop, the maker of Facebook games FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Words With Friends was valued at a whopping $7 billion.

Zynga stock was trading at $13.75 a share on the Nasdaq exchange at mid-day on Thursday.

Zynga games are free to play but the company makes money by selling virtual in-game goods to players and serving up advertising. The company sees the potential for revenue to grow if players flock to zynga.com.

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Facebook pushes advertisers to get creative and social with ads

Facebook showed off a new suite of premium ads Wednesday that it thinks will allow advertisers to interact more directly with their customers and finally brings marketing to Facebook’s mobile properties. The premium ads, some details of which were first shared here on GigaOM, include bigger ads that originate from a sponsor’s page and let Facebook users “like” and comment on those ads just like on a regular post. Facebook’s mobile site and apps will now feature the same premium ads, addressing a big shortcoming for Facebook, which has 425 million mobile users but derives no revenue from that traffic.

This revamped approach to Facebook advertising comes almost a month after Facebook filed to go public seeking what could be a record amount of public investment. The company continues to grow and currently has more than 800 million active users, but questions remain about how potential revenue Facebook can find. It generated $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011, according to its S-1, with about 85 percent coming from advertising. This year, it’s expected to generate $5.78 billion in ad revenue globally, according to eMarketer.

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Facebook Shakes Hardware World With Own Storage Gear

Facebook's hardware team is now building storage gear -- while decorating the walls at the company's new HQ in Menlo Park, California. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Facebook already built its own data center and its own servers. And now the social-networking giant is building its own storage hardware — hardware for housing all the digital stuff uploaded by its more than 845 million users.

“We store a few photos here and there,” says Frank Frankovsky, the ex-Dell man who oversees hardware design at Facebook. That would be an understatement. According to some estimates, the company stores over 140 billion digital photographs — and counting.

Like the web’s other leading players — including Google and Amazon — Facebook runs an online operation that’s well beyond the scope of the average business, and that translates to unprecedented hardware costs — and hardware complications. If you’re housing 140 billion digital photos, you need a new breed of hardware.

In building its own data center on the Oregon high desert, Facebook did away with electric chillers, uninterruptible power supplies, and other terribly inefficient gear. And in working with various hardware manufacturers to build its own servers, the company not only reduced power consumption, it stripped thee systems down to the bare essentials, making them easier to repair and less expensive. Frankovsky and his team call this “vanity free” engineering, and now, they’ve extended the philosophy to storage hardware.

“We’re taking the same approach we took with servers: Eliminate anything that’s not directly adding value. The really valuable part of storage is the disk drive itself and the software that controls how the data gets distributed to and recovered from those drives. We want to eliminate any ancillary components around the drive — and make it more serviceable,” Frankovsky says during a chat at the new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, which also happens to be the former home of onetime hardware giant Sun Microsystems.

“Break fixes are an ongoing activity in the data center. Unfortunately, disk drives are still mechanical items, and they do fail. In fact, they’re one of the higher failure-rate items. So [we want to] be able to quickly identify which disk has failed and replace it, without going through a lot of mechanical hoops.”

As with its data center and server creations, Facebook intends to “open source” its storage designs, sharing them with anyone who wants them. The effort is part of the company’s Open Compute Project, which seeks to further reduce the cost and power consumption of data center hardware by facilitating collaboration across the industry. As more companies contribute to the project, the thinking goes, the designs will improve, and as more outfits actually use the designs for servers and other gear — which are manufactured by Facebook partners in Taiwan and China — prices will drop even more.

When Facebook first introduced the project last spring, many saw it as a mere PR stunt. But some big-name outfits — including some outside the web game — are already buying Open Compute servers. No less a name than Apple has taken interest in Facebook’s energy-conscious data-center design. And according to Frankovsky, fifty percent of the contributions to the project’s open source designs now come from outside Facebook.

For Peter Krey — who helped build a massive computing grid for one of Wall Street largest financial institutions and now advises the CIOs and CTOs of multiple Wall Street firms as they build “cloud” infrastructure inside their data centers — Facebook’s project is long overdue. While building that computing grid, Krey says, he and his colleagues would often ask certain “tier one” server sellers to strip proprietary hardware and unnecessary components from their machines in order to conserve power and cost. But the answer was always no. “And we weren’t buying just a few servers,” he says. “We were buying thousands of servers.”

Now, Facebook has provided a new option for these big name Wall Street outfits. But Krey also says that even among traditional companies who can probably benefit from this new breed of hardware, the project isn’t always met with open arms. “These guys have done things the same way for a long time,” he tells Wired.

Hardware by Committee

Facebook will release its new storage designs in early May at the next Open Compute Summit, a mini-conference where project members congregate to discuss this experiment in open source hardware. Such names as Intel, Dell, Netflix, Rackspace, Japanese tech giant NTT Data, and motherboard maker Asus are members, and this past fall, at the last summit, Facebook announced the creation of a not-for-profit foundation around the project, vowing to cede control to the community at large.

The project began with Facebook’s data center and server designs. But it has since expanded to various other sub-projects, and the contributors include more than just web companies. Rackspace contributes, but so does financial giant Goldman Sachs.

Rackspace is leading an effort to build a “virtual I/O” protocol, which would allow companies to physically separate various parts of today’s servers. You could have your CPUs in one enclosure, for instance, your memory in another, and your network cards in a third. This would let you, say, upgrade your CPUs without touching other parts of the traditional system. “DRAM doesn’t [change] as fast as CPUs,” Frankovsky says. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually disaggregate the CPUs from the DRAM complex?”

With a sister project, project members are also working to create a new rack design that can accommodate this sort of re-imagined server infrastructure. A traditional server rack houses several individual machines, each with its own chassis. But the Open Rack project seeks to do away with the server chassis entirely and turn the rack into the chassis.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs is running an effort to build a common means for managing servers spread across your data center. Part of the appeal of the Open Compute Project, says Peter Krey, is that the project takes a “holistic approach” to the design of data center hardware. Members aren’t designing the data center separately from the servers, and the servers separately from the storage gear. They’re designing everything to work in tandem. “The traditional data center design…is Balkanized,” Krey says. “[But] the OCP guys have designed and created all the components to efficiently integrate and work together.”

This began with Facebook designing servers specifically for use with the revamped electrical system built for its data center in Prineville, Oregon. And soon, the effort will extend to the storage gear as well. Frankovsky provides few details about the new storage designs. But he says his team has rethought the “hot-plug drive carriers” that let you install and remove hard drives without powering a system down.

“I’ve never understood why hot-plug drive carriers have to come with these plastic handles on them,” he explains. “And if you’ve actually mounted a drive inside one of those drive carriers, there are these little bitty screws that you inevitably lose — and you’ll likely lose one onto a board that’s live and powered. That’s not a good thing.”

He says that the new design will eliminate not only the screws but the carriers themselves. “It’s a completely tool-less design,” Frankovsky says. “Our techs will be able to grab hold of a ‘slam latch,’ pull it up, and the act of pulling it up will pop the drive out.”

Frankovsky calls it “small stuff.” And that’s what it is. But if you’re running an operation that size of Facebook, that small stuff becomes very big indeed. In making one small change after another, Facebook is overhauling its infrastructure. And in sharing its designs with the rest of the world, it hopes to overhaul much more.

Cade Metz is the editor of Wired Enterprise. Got a NEWS TIP related to this story -- or to anything else in the world of big tech? Please e-mail him: cade_metz at wired.com.

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