We are looking for a team of students to investigate a set of known privacy concerns for a new consumer website as well as bring to our attention additional privacy concerns we may not yet be aware of. Students on this project will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Our product is a website that recommends content items (news, blogs, etc) and presents the user with headlines that you can click through to the full content. We collect information about what you read and what you don't read. This site also allows you to share items with friends. So you can create a social network, which means we also have information about who your friends are. And of course, we keep track of what you send to whom, and what you receive from others.  For more information about the company's mission, please visit www.likeit-loveit.com.

In general, many of the questions that we have relate to how public or private to make information about you on different levels: to your personal network (friends), the global network (everyone in the system), advertising agencies who purchase ad space in the system, and content publishers.  For example, we may want to make your user behavior available to ad agencies in the form of reports on how successful their ad campaigns are.

We would like to know what kinds of policies we can set by default, which actions should require explicit user permission up front, and which actions we can simply include in a privacy policy or terms of use agreement. We would also like to know what kinds of things we have to tell users even if we have the information only on an aggregated anonymous level.

Many of the issues we are facing, such as reports on ads, are not unique to our product. It would be good to survey other sites, common practices, any government regulations, as well as ask users about what their general expectations are, or how to set user expectations in our product.

Here is an initial list of issues to seed your thoughts:
- Should we let other people see who's in your network and other personal profile information? This could be stuff like your favorite feeds, your demographic information.
- Should we allow others in your network to see that you're currently logged into the system?
- At the moment, the send feature just sends the article as is. But a future version will probably allow you to add a comment to it. Then we will need to answer the question of how public/private to make the comments as the item gets forwarded to more and more people.
- Should we allow receipt notification of sent items (the recipient read
it)?
- We will definitely recommend items to you because a friend of yours
liked it, should we let you know which friend this was?
- Would it be OK to show a list of someone's likes to a friend of
theirs? Maybe not. But is it OK to show a system level list of most
popular topics/items? Then is it OK to show an aggregated list of the
most popular topics/items for just your group of friends?
- This site also allows you to tell it what kinds of things you're
interested in at the moment. This acts as a filter on the content we
recommend. For example, you can choose a topic, like "space shuttle".
But what happens if we let you specify a friend as a current interest?