Lets return to the Facebook dilemmas. Why am I so hung up about this at them moment? Its because though some empirical research I am doing at the moment – and from talking to friends and colleagues – Facebook seems to be playing increasingly important role in their lives and digital identities. And it is not just their online lives – Facebook is bridging the physical world and day to day social interactions within the digital. especially for young people, what they are talking about at school is what their friends have been saying and doing on Facebook the previous evening (or night as it seems to be for so many people). And of course from another perspective – the online discussions are based often on face to face social encounters.

Thus the widespread adoption of Facebook as a part of peoples everyday lives exposes issues around social networking – issues which have not been sufficently studied and which pose dilemmas for us as researchers and as a society.

I have read a series of blog posts recently by teachers frustrated at legal limits at posting any pictures of students on-line. These are teachers who want to celebrate their students achievements yet are unable to because of restrictions imposed on the rights to post images. Equally I have talked to educational technologists and researchers frustrated by the timidity of progress there is in terms of implementing social networking features in educational web sites for fear of transgressing perceived (or real) privacy rules

On the other had I have talked to people, young and not so young, deeply unhappy about images posted and tagged by others with their names and about which they knew nothing. With the present Facebook settings anyone is free to upload any picture of another person and tag them. Yet these images form an integral part of our digital identity and are an area over which we have little control. this can be of considerable distress to teenagers who may be concerned about their appearance, or indeed to adults. And as previous studies have shown it is remarkably difficult to get an image erased from Facebook, once it has been posted. Equallyworrying is that the present Facebook tagging system makes it very easy for many people, whether friends or not, to access photo albums.

Facebook does have settings, which allow for more privacy. But the default settings are remarkably open: it probably is simply not in Facebook’s interests to discourage more restrictive settings. And how many people know how to change their privacy settings in Facebook.

I am all for openness, open education, open discussions, open knowledge and a culture of sharing. Yet as digital identities become ever more important, it is critical that we have the rights and the tools to manage that identity and that social network providers appreciate and support those rights and make it easy for individuals to understand how they can mange both privacy and openness. This is an issue which will not go away.

No real time to blog today – much too much admin to allow such trivial things! But I couldn’t resist giving myself a short break from the spreadsheets to comment on two of today’s twitter memes.

The first is the draconian new Conditions of Service released by Facebook. As Chris Walters points out anything you upload to Facebook can now be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

That language is the same as in the old TOS, but there was an important couple of lines at the end of that section that have been removed:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

Furthermore, the “Termination” section near the end of the TOs states:

“The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.”

The second is the goings on in New Zealand where the protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A‘ that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny has led to a viral campaign to black out avatars on social networking sites.

Is it it just that the law is an ass? Or is it that legislators are quite happy to take action to prevent individuals sharing files, sharing ideas and creating new works, but bow down to the real pirates – the Facebooks of the world. Money still counts when it comes to the law.

This was recorded live at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. Many thanks to Andreas Auwarter who recorded the audio and did the post processing.

The Guardian is one of the more sane newspapers when it comes to social panics. But even they could not resist headlining this article ‘Warning to parents over children ‘being raised online’.

The report has not yet been released. But it looks interesting and if the Guardian is to be believed is in line with reports from other countries. However, when it comes to the level of recommendations it simply gets it wrong.

“British children are spending more than 20 hours a week online, most of it at social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, and are in effect being “raised online”, according to research from the Institute for Public Policy Research” says the Guardian.

“But the IPPR research, to be published next month, raises concerns about the content that young people can access and the lack of awareness among parents about what their children are doing on the internet.

“My mum will ask sometimes ‘Is it safe?’ but she doesn’t really know,” a 16-year-old girl told the IPPR. A 14-year-old boy added that even the sort of child-locks that are put on internet access at school can be circumvented by youngsters, who often know more about IT systems than their teachers. “We have restrictions at school but we can just get an administrator’s account and take them off.”

Children are also aware of the restrictions that the sites implement, with one 15-year-old girl telling researchers: “Everyone lies about their age ‘cos I think it’s like if you’re under 18, your profile gets set to private.”

The report shows that teenagers are digitally promiscuous, switching allegiance from sites as fashions change. One 16-year-old girl told the IPPR: “First it was like everyone was on MSN, then everyone sort of has Bebo, now everyone who had MSN moved on to Facebook, so it’s just what everyone’s doing at that time.”

The IPPR found that four out of five children aged five to 15 have access to the internet at home, with 40% of 8- to 11-year-olds and 71% of 12- to 15-year-olds saying they browse the web on their own. Contact with some form of online pornography was reported by 57%.

The IPPR wants the regulator Ofcom to take a more active role in the protection of children on the internet, by making recommendations to the government about where there is a need for action, such as tackling violent user-generated content. “The government should consider extending Ofcom’s remit to cover internet content.”

It also wants sites that are popular with young people, such as MySpace and Bebo, to develop what it terms cross-industry guidelines and become funding members of the Internet Watch Foundation.

The report suggests there is a lot of work to be done in educating parents about what their children are doing online. Ofcom already looks at the level of what it terms media literacy among consumers, but the IPPR wants the Department for Children, Schools and Families to have overall control of media literacy, with better information and support for parents.

The report, Behind the Screen: The Hidden Life of Youth, comes as Tanya Byron, the television psychologist and parenting expert appointed last year by Gordon Brown to look into the issues surrounding children and technology, prepares to release her final report. She is expected to recommend that computers be placed in communal areas rather than children’s bedrooms so parents can keep an eye on what is accessed.

A committee of MPs, meanwhile, has been investigating harmful content on the internet and in video games.

“The internet offers great benefits and opportunities for young people,” said the author of the IPPR report, Kay Withers. “But … parents need to be reassured about what they are looking at.

“Government needs to improve media literacy programmes for kids and to make sure parents are aware of how they can support young people’s positive online experiences.””

So where does this report get it wrong? The recommendation for cross industry guidelines is good – depending of course on the content of thoee guidelines. But he idea that access to computers should only be in communal areas is just unrealistic. Do we really want a return to the days of the 1950s when lack of central heating meant families huddles together in one room and young people had no personal space for chatting with their friends (because that is what they predominantly do on line). I remember those days, I was there.

The main tenet of the recommendations are controlling digital literacy and reassuring parents. These are not the answers. The key people are the users – in this case young people. And the answer to digital literacy and on-line safety are engaging users, not control or reassurance. That seems to have been forgotten. In a skype chat yesterday Cristina Costa said: “Basically I think kids need more attention, teachers more support and the entire community needs to engage with new technologies actively.” That sums it up for me.