Blogs / Discoblog

Consider this post to be your daily reminder to check your social network privacy settings–too much transparency could cost you your insurance benefits, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Nathalie Blanchard, a Granby resident, says she’s suffering from severe depression that has made it impossible for her to work full-time for the past 18-months.

She says her sick leave payments were cut after insurance giant Manulife obtained profile pictures on Facebook showing her at bars, whooping it up during her birthday and on a beach holiday.

Blanchard, who lives in Quebec province, said her doctor told her to go have some fun, but apparently her insurer thought she was having too much to be depressed. According to another CBC article, the moments of revelry didn’t cure her condition:

“In the moment I’m happy, but before and after I have the same problems” as before, she said.

She’s taking them to court, in what should be an interesting case to test social media’s reach into the real world. The case suggests a host of other difficult questions: Can insurance companies raise your premiums if they see a picture of you smoking a cigarette on the internet? Will the court decide you can make a medical diagnosis from a Facebook picture? What about a weekend’s worth of happy tweets?

Another take home lesson, kids, is that should you make headlines, for whatever dubious reason, your Facebook pics will also be on the news. However in this case, Blanchard offered up her photos to get her story to the media. ABC News has a short video interview with Blanchard on their site.

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Image: Facebook

Our obsession with posting photos on Facebook, tweeting our every move, and surfing the Internet creates an electronic trail of our life, whether we like it or not. But 75-year-old Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell takes digital recording to a whole new level: He creates e-memories so he won’t have to remember a single detail of his days.

Bell lugs around video cameras and audio recorders to record every action and social interaction. Not only does he save receipts by taking digital pictures of them, he records every single bill, medical record, and conversation. So far he’s in his tenth year of living this digital lifestyle and has amassed more than 350 gigabytes of memory (not including the video storage).

If you’re jealous, the good news is that soon you might be able to make your own digital library of your life. Microsoft is creating a SenseCam, a device that would hang around your neck and take pictures.

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Image: flickr/ Aquillo

Several MIT students have created quite a project for their class on “ethics and law on the electronic frontier” [ed note: Does no one take Modern British Poetry in college anymore?]. According to the Boston Globe:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said.

Even their professor, a computer scientist, was amazed. The project, which was done in 2007 and dubbed “gaydar” by the class, has yet to be published in a scientific journal. The data plugged into the program consisted of the friend links of 1,544 men who said they were straight, 21 who said they were bisexual, and 33 who said they were gay. According to the Globe:

Gay men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, giving the computer program a way to infer a person’s sexuality based on their friends.

Other similar programs have been created to ferret out info like political affiliations. Granted, less germane perhaps than How these programs are created is the question, Why would we want them to be?

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Whoever said money can’t buy friends is dead wrong…at least when it comes to the social networking site Facebook.

A new service called uSocial, which became available this week, offers the chance to purchase Facebook “friends” for the bargain price of $200 for 1,000 friends. If more is better (and more usually is), you can get 5,000 buds for the promotional rate of $654.30, lasting until mid-September.

Here’s how it works, according to the AP:

USocial logs in to a client’s Facebook profile or creates a new one. It seeks out people who would be a good fit—like car buffs if uSocial is trying to promote a specialty auto-parts company—and sends them friends requests tailored to that business. The requests don’t mention that uSocial is working on behalf of the business.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook representatives say uSocial violates Facebook’s terms of service. They say that volunteering your account information makes the site less secure, and that doling out friend requests for someone else—as the uSocial service does—makes the social networking site less authentic. Plus, some critics warn that random”friend” requests could potentially really irritate Facebook users.

Sure, receiving “friend” requests from someone you’ve never met can get pretty annoying. But is Facebook really that authentic in the first place? Ask the person who has 2,000 so-called “friends”—no matter how they acquired them.

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Image: flickr / 4_eveR_younG

Have you seen Wired writer Evan Ratliff in the past few weeks? We’re guessing the answer is no—otherwise, we assume you would’ve claimed your $5,000 prize.

That’s because Ratliff is doing his best to keep his whereabouts unknown (even to friends and family) until Sept. 15. The goal of the stunt is to demonstrate how easy it can be to disappear under the radar, even in the digital age. ABC News reports:

[Ratliff] must stay hidden for one month with a bounty over his head.

But to keep things interesting, Ratliff can’t go entirely off the grid. Like any digital denizen, he has to keep up with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and make at least the occasional cell phone call or credit card transaction.

By posting those digital breadcrumbs to the contest’s online page, Wired hopes sleuths both high-tech and low will be enticed to join the hunt. Already, hundreds — maybe thousands — have taken the bait, populating Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and comment threads with tips and teasers about his whereabouts.

Ratliff apparently got the idea while writing about Matthew Alan Sheppard, who disappeared in an attempt to escape  financial ruin. Wired’s plot seems a little gimmicky, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t curious about where he is—and who (if anyone) will be able to track him down before time runs out.

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Image: flickr / Si1Very

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, social networking tools are growing faster than anyone can keep track of, and are being used plenty of unexpected ways.

Some developments are questionably beneficial, like new education standards in England that may require students to learn to use online tools like Twitter and Wikipedia, while scrapping history. Who needs a textbook to teach the Second World War when you can learn about it from a user-generated encyclopedia?

Other ideas have ambition, like Nokia’s investment in a California startup that will allow cell phones to act, essentially, like credit cards. Now, the developed world may not need additional forms of credit, but in countries where people often lack bank accounts, the ability to use prepaid phone credit as cash—or to transfer funds for a loan to a friend, for example—will facilitate transactions and a lot of everyday life.

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• Social networking can lead to increased isolation, health problems, and harmful immune responses. So does that mean we shouldn’t post this link to Facebook?

• They tried to make us go to virtual rehab but we said no, no, no.

• No bird is too extinct to show up on a dinner plate somewhere!

• New manually dexterous robots promise to save all the world’s problems. Well, not really, but they can play rock, paper, scissors.

• One nice thing about the economic collapse: The U.S. couldn’t afford to build massive space weapons, even if it wanted to!

• Asexuals, unite! Just don’t start recruiting too many to your cause.

• Endangered oceans, rejoice: You have a secret weapon. And it’s fish poop.

• And it’s a good thing, since the best option we humans have come up with for saving all aquatic life is re-naming fish “sea kittens.”

• Facebook graduates from a civil litigation tool to a crime-fighting tool.

• This latest eco-trend actually makes some sense: cat hair clothing and accessories.

•  Today in animal intelligence: Just how smart are bees, anyway?