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Facebook as a medium to explore privacy issues

Liz Filardi, an artist based in New York, is trying to come to terms with her lack of ownership and privacy of her personal identity on social networking sites such as Facebook. Her work is timely– it foregrounds privacy issues and latent problems in the site, such as recent changes that allows anyone to see who is attending an event and linking Facebook data to other sites such as CNN (see here and here.) In her piece, Black and White, she imagines how a fatal stalking case that led to the first Anti-Stalking Law in California, could take place on Facebook. By logging in as the perpetrator or victim, you discover the messages that could have taken place between them.

Liz Filardi describes this piece:

One of the original cases of criminal stalking in America is retold within the framework of a social network called Black&White, which consists of two mirrored profiles, those of Laura Black and Richard Farley. The website extrapolates on the tongue-and-cheek usage of the term “stalking” to describe the accepted social protocol, a far cry from the original behavior that, in this case, lead to a massacre at a booming Silicon Valley company in 1988. This project points to new and different levels of trust, privacy and social order in our networked society, tells the story behind the first Anti-Stalking Law passed in California in 1991 in the language and structure of networks, and tragically binds together two tormented people, once at opposite ends of an ineffective restraining order.

Black and White:
http://turbulence.org/Works/stalkingsocial/blacknwhite/

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