Do you want to know a secret? Social steganography

Paul Raven @ 09-02-2011






Be Sociable, Share!

6 Responses to “Do you want to know a secret? Social steganography”

  1. Athena Andreadis says:

    “Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra”

    What you’re talking about is really group insider talk, in which kids have always excelled (made up languages of twins being a paramount example).

  2. Wintermute says:

    I’m not sure this is an example of the sophistication in young people’s communication, as it could just as easily be a tech-vangelist mind looking for cybernails to pound with the word “steganography”. Frankly, I see very little virtual-self awareness in kids, who seem completely oblivious in their Facebook updates. The teenie boppers I know routinely drop Facebombs of their latest Mary-jane-laced bender, with their parents and whole family tree in on the loop. One was dense enough to have a friend hide in the bushes and sneak a picture of him doing a hand off with his drug dealer, splashing that loaded gun all over his Myspace page like some kinda trophy (the NARCs found his lack of social intelligence very pleasing). Maybe teens just post lyrics cause they got the My Chemical Romance stuck in their head.

  3. Paul Raven says:

    Perhaps you just know some particularly dumb kids, WM? 😉

    (Seriously, though, I’ve seen similar behaviour, and I think that all it proves is that we haven’t out-evolved stupidity, be it in adolescence or any other phase of life. Not sure you can blame that on technology and make it stick.)

  4. Wintermute says:

    You’re right, we were stupid before technology. Technology just amplifies the impact of the stupidity (instead of just a few friends, the whole freakin’ world knows what you did Last Summer). 🙂

  5. Wintermute says:

    I should note, an FBI agent actually showed up to a school (private, college prep) of one of these friends, to do a public service announcement about (absence of) information privacy on the net. He pulled up random Facebook pages and other web data of students at the school, just using some simple searches. Turns out nearly all the students had severely incriminating photos and other media, college acceptance dealbusters available, most of it on Facebook.

  6. Robert Best says:

    The idea of social steganography became so appealing to me that I decided to create my first Android app with the sole purpose of allowing users to add hidden secret messages to seemingly normal Facebook status updates. It’s called Securebook:


    Check it out if you get a chance!