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Privacy

Facebook Privacy Concerns

Facebook officially launched its new controversial privacy settings which will have a significant instant impact on the extent to which private information is shared on it. Facebook claims that these new changes will help make it easier for users to decide what to share and with whom, but the reality is that the amount of information that can be set to private has been reduced and the default privacy settings are now configured to have most content shared with the everyone on Facebook and beyond.
The original success of Facebook over other social networks such as MySpace is believed to be attributed to the high levels of privacy it allowed its users to have. Previously, users had the option to share some of their personal data, such as their profile picture, with certain groups of users, such as friends only, however, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, the pages the user is a fan of, and some other personal information, are all now treated as publicly available information which cannot be hidden from anyone if the user chooses to put them on Facebook.
Another major change in the new privacy scheme is that default settings for writing new status updates and sharing pictures and other content, are set to be shared with everyone instead of friends only. This means that when you make a new status update this update will be visible to everyone whether or not you have them as friends, and as a lot of content on Facebook can be indexed by search engines such as Google, this means that even people not on Facebook may find your status updates if they make a relevant search. While privacy settings for such a feature could be configured to a more private option, the majority of users do not check their settings and very few people would realize that their old default settings were changed to the new default settings for sharing everything with everyone without them taking any action!

The new changes in privacy settings do have some new options that could allow users to have better privacy. For example, users now have the option to have per-status update privacy restrictions so that you post an item that you share only with your close friends or only with your work colleagues without affecting the rest of your updates.

It is widely believed that the new changes in Facebook privacy settings were made to push people to share more information with everyone, while this might not be in the interest of the majority of the users, Facebook hopes that this would enable it to compete with services such as Twitter – which by default makes users share their micro status updates openly. However, the purpose of Facebook is totally different from that of Twitter and Facebook’s attempt to expand into Twitter might be faced with a backlash.

If you are on Facebook and you regularly share private pictures of your family and friends, you might want to make sure you check the new privacy settings of Facebook and set your content to be viewable only by the groups of people you desire. If you would not like everyone to know that you are a fan of a certain page, you have no option but to unsubscribe from that page. The same goes for your profile picture, and other information classified as publicly available information, which you will have to remove completely from Facebook if you do not want everyone to see it.

The nature of Facebook is changing and this might be a reflection of the increased willingness of people to share more things online, but I doubt that the majority of people appreciate the impact this information could have on their social and professional life. It is still very unwise to share private information without any restrictions as it would be very hard, if not impossible, to get them off the internet afterwards.

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Uncategorized

The Twitter Craze

Twitter is the hottest thing on the Internet right now, yet people either do not understand, think it is silly, or are addicted to it. In Oman, Twitter is steadily gaining popularity as more people and companies join it. For those who still do not know what this is, Twitter is a service that lets you send very short messages (140 letters or less) to people who follow you. If you are on Facebook, think of it as a website dedicated to status updates, and instead of being restricted to friends you know, it is public.
The short messages of Twitter can be used in a number of ways. The most commonly understood method is to simply use it as an answer to the question “What are you doing right now?”. Your answer could be anything from “Having my famous cereal for breakfast” to “Running late for work as usual”. These are updates that enable your friends to know what you are doing at any moment.

The second function for Twitter is to use it as a chat platform. Twitter enables its users to reply to each other’s messages instantly using a myriad of devices. If you need a quick answer to a short question, like the location of a restaurant or an advice on something to buy, you can make an update on Twitter and get a short answer from any of your followers quickly.

The third function of Twitter is to use it as a source of real-time news, whether it came from professional industries or normal people. The concept of a “Retweet”, which is the equivalent to a rebroadcast of a twitter update, makes news spread across the whole of Twitter instantly, so if you found a tweet with breaking news, you can retweet it instantly to your friends who are likely to retweet it even further down the chain.

For people like myself who are officially addicted to service (I have made more than 10,000 status updates since I registered two years ago), Twitter has become part of the lifestyle we follow. My followers know about my life more than anybody else does, and I know a lot about the lives of those who I follow in return. I have used many different methods of communication over the years, but I had never before made a connection with so many people on such a personal level like I have on Twitter. It might sound unnatural to those who don’t use the service, but I now feel that I am part of a community which I cannot abandon easily.

I have been told that I no longer have any privacy because people know every single move I make from the minute I wake up until the minute I decide to stop reading my novel in bed and go off to sleep. I have to admit that I am no longer sure about the extent to which I should disclose personal information about myself, and I do not advise anyone to tweet as much as I do, but I believe that the whole world is still trying to understand social media and it will take us a while to establish a common etiquette for using such a service. Until that happens we will have to tweet using common sense to ensure that we do not harm ourselves and those close to us by exposing too much information to the rest of the world.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

Categories
Copyright

The Real Victims of Piracy

Even though almost ten years have passed since Oman got its first copyright law, most people still seem to have a strange self-entitlement to everything they find on the internet. The majority of people do not have any feeling of guilt when they illegally download any song, video, or game they did not pay for.
Oman, and many other Arab countries, are in a unique position that makes them detached from primary producers of popular digital content such as the US and Europe – who might not necessarily consider this region as a target for their music or computer programs. It is very difficult for foreign content producers to take legal action against infringers of copyright in Oman and it is impossible for the authorities to regulate illegal downloads on the internet (even though they somehow seem to always have the time and resources to block every single VOIP website they can find).

To the majority of people copyright infringement seems like a victimless crime: musicians and film makers in the US seem to be doing alright, they do not really expect to sell in Oman, of all places, much anyway, and even if these companies did make a loss, they are multinational institutions that can make money through a million other ways.

This makes it very difficult for our region to be taken seriously as a viable market for selling some copyright works. The result of this is that those of us who want to legally buy music in Oman find it very difficult to find any shop that can afford to continue stock up music CDs that nobody buys. Software products rarely ever get an official release in this region and there are no tech support or after sale services for such programs. The gaming industry is totally unregulated in this region and there is never any localization of game content.

The worst problem with piracy is that it makes it very difficult for local musicians, programmers, and game developers to be able to make money from creating local content in this market. Creating a polished work obviously requires money and investment, and you cannot make money from intellectual property works in a place where copyright is not respected. It is no wonder that there are no Omani video games or computer programs (genuine or otherwise) sold in any computer shop in the country.

Oman has had copyright law in place for about a decade now, but it is very difficult to enforce it because of the internet and the fact that content providers will find it very inconvenient to take cross-border legal action. Society itself must start respecting copyright and realize that the biggest loser in all of this is society itself, because if we do not encourage or reward creativity we will continue to only live off works made in other places in the world.

The situation in Oman is not totally hopeless because authorities have realized that the process to create respect for copyright must start from the bottom up, and as a result a special lesson about copyright has been added to the eleventh grade government school syllabus here in Oman in hope it makes students appreciate the importance of copyright and how piracy could be damaging. The college of law at SQU is also expected to start teaching intellectual property as part of the law degree curriculum. That by itself will not instantly make everyone respect copyright, but it is a step in the right direction.

Categories
Data Protection Privacy

Personal Data in the Digital Age

The internet in Oman has developed a great deal in recent years, we now have fast speed internet spreading across the country and we have an extensive reach of high speed wireless internet as well. However, the way the content of this internet is regulated and censored did not see much of a development since the Internet was first introduced in the 90s.
Oman is one of the more liberal and tolerant countries in the Gulf and no major websites such as YouTube, Flickr, or Facebook were ever blocked. The recent report on internet censorship issued by the OpenNet Initiative found that there is no evidence of any political Internet censorship in Oman and the majority of Internet censorship is made on social and cultural grounds, for example, hacking and pornographic websites are usually blocked, but websites that criticize government officials are not. The government usually uses legal methods, such as criminal law to deal with issues of defamation and breach of confidence to hold authors accountable for what they write. However, the government will not block their website.

The aim of the censorship process is to protect society values and help prevent minors from being exposed to pornographic material. The process by which such websites are selected and blocked is arranged by an automation software that is operated by Omantel. This software is expected to use a number search and indexing methods to know which websites to block.

Using the method of censorship to help “protect” society values might have worked in the early days of the Internet when the number of websites was small and manageable, but we now live in an age where the Internet is massively expanding every second due to low cost for hosting websites and the expansion in user-generated content. It is now impossible to be able to block all pornographic websites when there are hundreds new of them being created every single minute.

The result is a failing system that cannot logically protect us from all pornographic websites, instead, the automated nature of censorship leads to overblocking clean websites that have no offending content. There are also a number of specialist users who need access to websites that may include “offending content”, such as nudity, for medical or research purposes – but such users cannot access these websites here due to the fact that they are classified as offending websites.

The regulators should admit the fact that such censorship is not a solution, anybody can do a Google image for porn right now to be entertained with loads of offending materials. The internet is expanding as we speak and there is no way to “block” it at the top yet allow people to use it efficiently as the same time.

If it is society values which we aim to protect, then we should educate parents and families on how to use software protection shields on their own computers to protect their kids from accessing any offending websites or restricting their access to a limited number of websites to visit. Specialist users and students should be able to have the option to have unfiltered internet if they would like to access websites that feature nudity for legitimate purposes.

Categories
Privacy

Omani Spam

Email is one of the most abused methods for sending spam as more than 75% of all emails sent in the world are spam messages. I take all logically reasonable methods to protect my email address from being collected by spambots, but like everyone else on this planet, somehow spam still ends up collecting in my inbox. It is very unlikely for me to be fooled by an email scam and I will never buy something from a company that sends me an unsolicited email, but I still hate the amount of time it takes me to go through my email inbox on daily basis to find real messages in the piles of advertisements I never asked for.
Even though spam filters have developed over the years and a great number of spam messages will be recognized and blocked by most email clients, spammers have always been one step ahead of filter technologies and have developed advanced techniques for making sure that their messages are not detected. That is the reason why the best method for combating spam is by relying on legislation rather than technology.

Many countries around the world have criminalized spam and impose various restrictions on those who attempt to send mass commercial messages to the public, such restrictions include the requirement to enable end users to opt-out of any mailing list, prohibition of hiding the sender’s identity, and the prohibition of the collection of email addresses without the consent of their owners.

Until very recently the use of email marketing was not a mainstream strategy for companies in Oman, but along with the growth of the use of the internet in the country came the awareness of the ease at which products and services can be marketed using simple email messages, and now even companies in Oman participate in the shameful act of spam. I personally received an unsolicited email message advertising an upcoming technology exhibition in Muscat, an email message about a local IT solutions company advertising its services to install Google apps for businesses, and many other countless messages from random Omani online discussion boards. I am sure I never gave my email address to any of these senders and none of these messages instructed me on how to unsubscribe.

I doubt that any of these companies think about the consequences of their bulk messages and I do not think that they consider themselves as spammers, yet even though they ought to know that what they are doing is unacceptable, they are still technically not doing anything illegal as the law in Oman does not prohibit sending an unsolicited commercial message to anyone. This got to change before the use of email in Oman becomes bloated with advertisements and online scams.

Until the law clearly makes this an offense, you can play your role in fighting spam by always using the ‘report spam’ or ‘mark as spam’ button if it is made available by your email provider, this helps in detecting future messages as spam for you and other people. Make sure that you do not ever trust a company that sends you an unsolicited email, and never send advertisements yourself to other people who do not explicitly tell you that they are interested in receiving them!

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

Categories
Censorship

Internet Censorship

The internet in Oman has developed a great deal in recent years, we now have fast speed internet spreading across the country and we have an extensive reach of high speed wireless internet as well. However, the way the content of this internet is regulated and censored did not see much of a development since the Internet was first introduced in the 90s.
Oman is one of the more liberal and tolerant countries in the Gulf and no major websites such as YouTube, Flickr, or Facebook were ever blocked. The recent report on internet censorship issued by the OpenNet Initiative found that there is no evidence of any political Internet censorship in Oman and the majority of Internet censorship is made on social and cultural grounds, for example, hacking and pornographic websites are usually blocked, but websites that criticize government officials are not. The government usually uses legal methods, such as criminal law to deal with issues of defamation and breach of confidence to hold authors accountable for what they write. However, the government will not block their website.

The aim of the censorship process is to protect society values and help prevent minors from being exposed to pornographic material. The process by which such websites are selected and blocked is arranged by an automation software that is operated by Omantel. This software is expected to use a number search and indexing methods to know which websites to block.

Using the method of censorship to help “protect” society values might have worked in the early days of the Internet when the number of websites was small and manageable, but we now live in an age where the Internet is massively expanding every second due to low cost for hosting websites and the expansion in user-generated content. It is now impossible to be able to block all pornographic websites when there are hundreds new of them being created every single minute.

The result is a failing system that cannot logically protect us from all pornographic websites, instead, the automated nature of censorship leads to overblocking clean websites that have no offending content. There are also a number of specialist users who need access to websites that may include “offending content”, such as nudity, for medical or research purposes – but such users cannot access these websites here due to the fact that they are classified as offending websites.

The regulators should admit the fact that such censorship is not a solution, anybody can do a Google image for porn right now to be entertained with loads of offending materials. The internet is expanding as we speak and there is no way to “block” it at the top yet allow people to use it efficiently as the same time.

If it is society values which we aim to protect, then we should educate parents and families on how to use software protection shields on their own computers to protect their kids from accessing any offending websites or restricting their access to a limited number of websites to visit. Specialist users and students should be able to have the option to have unfiltered internet if they would like to access websites that feature nudity for legitimate purposes.

Categories
Uncategorized

Wikipedia – The Missed Opportunity

We all know that Wikipedia is not really a scientific authority – any person who visits a page on Wikipedia can click on the edit button to change what is written on that page without even having to register. Yet even though there is a great opportunity for abuse, the majority of the users of the web seem to, whether consciously or subconsciously, take information written Wikipedia seriously and blindly rely on it without ever checking if the page has a list of references. Wikipedia should never be taken as an authority by itself for the obvious fact that any person can edit it, but I think that Wikipedia is a clear indication of the opinion of the majority of people on any given topic, because a fact that is not commonly believed to be true would be edited by someone else.
One of the main reasons Wikipedia has become such an authority is the fact that it is highly ranked by Google, meaning that it is very likely that any search made on Google for a topic on Wikipedia would most likely have a Wikipedia page as the first result on Google, this makes it very likely for Wikipedia to be visited by the person making the search.

Unsurprisingly, this had led all those who care about their “image” on the internet to check and update the Wikipedia entry that covers them, this includes governments, companies, celebrities, etc. There is no doubt that Wikipedia can be used to further promote a product as well as inform the public with all the facts about it because it is one of the most visited websites on the internet. However, the majority of people in Oman seem to be oblivious of the power of Wikipedia and there is barely anything written about Oman on it besides the main page on Oman and Muscat. As a country that considers tourism as one of its primarily economic pillars, it is totally unacceptable that many of the major cities and landmarks are nowhere to be seen on Wikipedia. The biggest contributors to Wikipedia worldwide are scholars and university students, but in Oman many universities and colleges do not even have a Wikipedia page on them!

I do not think updating Wikipedia should be a task assigned to a specific person – at the end Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia that is expected to be edited and updated by everyone. I was upset to see that Sohar’s page, my hometown, had an ugly picture of a factory and mentioned nothing about the city other than the fact that it has a booming industrial sector. I decided to upload a picture I took of Sohar Fort and wrote a little bit about hotels, parks, schools, and shopping centers in Sohar. Now whenever someone makes a search on Google for “Sohar” the content I wrote myself appears on the top of more than 400 thousands other links.

If every person wrote a tiny bit about their hometown, their school, or their favourite park in the country we would contribute in spreading the word about our country to the world even further. You cannot seriously consider yourself to be existing in today’s world if you are not present online, making sure that you are present on Wikipedia (if you satisfy their notability requirements) and that your page is accurate and up to date are two of the most important aspects of online presence. There is no excuse for any government agency or company in Oman not to have a proper Wikipedia page. Go do yours now!

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

Categories
Copyright

Piracy in Oman on the Rise?

Piracy in Oman
A crazy article was published earlier this week on the UAE’s The National stating that game and software piracy in Oman is ‘resurfacing’. The article interviews a random Omani game shopkeeper who claims according to his own statistics that young people in Oman spend a total of a million Omani rials on pirated software on monthly basis. According to his statistics, the local economy loses 30 to 40 million rials a year because of pirated software.

There is no doubt that these stats are completely rubbish. The small time shop keeper somehow assumes that ‘young people’ go and buy physical disks to pirate their games and movies, when in reality the majority of illegal downloading obviously occurs over the internet and does not require young people to spend a 1,000,000 Omani rials.

The justifications made by this person for the ‘resurfacing’ of piracy are not only illogical, but they are simply false because expats can still work in computer shops and do sell computer games and software.

Being an honest gamer who buys legitimate games is very difficult in Oman, original games take months to arrive and when they do they are usually sold at astronomical prices. The article itself claims that it does not make sense for young people to pay RO 40 when the pirated copy costs RO 1. The truth is that even honest gamers find it unreasonable to pay RO 40 (more than $100) when the same exact disc is sold in the states for a MAXIMUM of $60.  Many gamers, including myself, choose to buy grey area imports and have it shipped from the US for a cheaper price, than buying the grey area imports sold in these stores for double the price.

I am really not sure that piracy in Oman is ‘resurfacing’ – because it really never went down. In the age of digital piracy and bitTorrent, the only solution to the problem would be through educating people about the impact piracy has on our own culture and economy. It is no wonder that there are no game developers in Oman when it is impossible to make profit of any game in this market.

Categories
Censorship

The OpenNet Initiative Report on Oman

internetaccessoman(Photo credits: squacco)

The OpenNet Initiative, a partnership between the University of Toronto, Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, has published last month an annual report on filtering and surveillance of the Internet in Oman.

The report summarizes the factors that contribute in censoring the internet including the legal framework and Omantel’s terms and conditions. The report concludes that censorship in Oman is primarily made on social basis as it focuses on pornographic, homosexual, and anti-hacking websites, but does not necessarily involve political censorship. The report claims that Omantel uses American-made censorship products such as SmartFilter.

The report also claims that the Omani government monitors “private communications, including mobile phones, e-mail, and Internet chat room exchanges, and interrogates chat room users who are critical of government officials or policies by tracking them through their ISP addresses”. The report cites as its authority on this fact the US State Department Human Rights Report that was published in March 2008.

The report is very interesting, but it has a number of inaccuracies (the majority of the websites mentioned are not actually blocked), cites irrelevant cases to support some points (the Omania case was a defamation case and had nothing to do with surveillance), and makes no mention Article 61(4) of the Telecom Law and the recent case of Ali Al Zuwaidi.

However, the report still paints a very general idea in the situation in Oman and how people are pushed to self-censor themselves even though the constitution guarantees the right of freedom of speech. You can read it via this link.

Categories
Copyright

Omani Bloggers and Copyright

Copyright Infringment - OmanForum
A bizarre event occurred today in which expat blogger Angry in Oman was shocked to see a post she wrote on her blog posted in OmanForum under a username identical to her blog name. Angry in Oman was outraged because it seemed as she personally made those posts on the forum and the blog post did not tell the whole story of the incident mentioned making people make the wrong assumptions about what really happened.

It eventually turned out that this was a new forum feature introduced by OmanForum’s administrator for which he thought it would be ‘a good idea’ to copy other people blog posts in the forum because it makes ‘the forum more interesting’ and gives the author ‘extra exposure’. The administrator of OmanForum removed the thread after several members complained about the issue, however, he did not seem to be convinced that he did anything wrong.

For some reason, many people assume that crediting the source gives them the right to copy it, which is obviously not the case. If Neo, OmanForum’s administrator, has been for a long time copying articles from elsewhere and crediting them doesn’t mean that what has been doing is legally or morally right. The exceptions to the protection of copyright n Oman are very limited in scope, and copying for the purpose of “making the forum more interesting and giving the author extra exposure” is obviously not one of these exceptions.

Technically, Angry in Oman can sue for copyright infringement, but obviously she will not do that as it compromise her identity. If she ever were to take legal action, she should be able to force OmanForum to remove all infringing content, and she migh even be able to ask for monetary compensation because OmanForum is a business venture that sells advertising and commercially benefits from the copyright infringement it undertakes as material copied from elsewhere is used to attract more readers and more advertisement impressions.