Sixteen and 17 year olds spend 43% longer on the loo every day than their elders, according to new research from the AA's Home Emergency Response service.

While this may spark a national survey into the health and bladder control of our youngsters infact the findings reveal that more than half the time they spend there (58%) is 'wasted' on extracurricular activities such as texting, using social-networking sites or playing smartphone games. Facebook and YouTube are popular pastimes Teenagers spend far more time on the toilet playing games and using social media than they do for the primary purpose


So what are the number one and two activities....

Well they may not be what you think, on average, 16 and 17 year olds spend 22 minutes and 29 seconds a day on the loo, compared to 15 minutes and 39 seconds for those aged 18 or over. However, 13 minutes and 7 seconds of this time is spent on supplementary toilet pastimes, and the research suggests that this is largely because the youngsters are increasingly using technology while in the toilet.

Sending or reading texts is the most popular peripheral pursuit for 16 and 17 year olds, with 55% of them claiming do this on the loo, compared to just 19% of those aged 18 or above. One third of them (32%) uses Facebook in the restroom, 25% use YouTube or other video websites, and 23% play games on their smartphones. A further one in 10 (9%) uses Twitter while in the lavatory.

Reading is still a popular additional toilet distraction for the younger age group, with 27% of 16 and 17 year olds claiming to read a book and 18% saying they read a magazine there. Eight per cent of this age group have taken to reading a Kindle on the loo, compared to an average of 4% for those aged 18 or over.

The AA's report says that over the course of a year 16 and 17 year olds 'waste' over 3 days and 7 hours on superfluous toilet time, compared to just 1 day and 2 hours for those aged 65 and over.

Time spent on the loo by age

            Age group                Average time per day       Amount of this time spent on supplementary activities

                16–17                 22 min 29 s                         13 min 7 s 
                18–24                 14 min 58 s                         7 min 8 s 
                25–34                 17 min 14 s                         8 min 49 s 
                35–44                 16 min 24 s                         7 min 7 s 
                45–54                 16 min 36 s                         7 min 9 s 
                55–64                 12 min 53 s                         6 min 15 s 
                65+                     15 min 52 s                         4 min 20 s

Popular peripheral pastimes on the loo

Activity                                 Percentage aged 16–17             Percentage aged 18+
Texting                                             55%                                     19%
Facebook                                         32%                                      12%
Read a book                                     27%                                     16%
YouTube or other video sites            25%                                       3%
Play games on smartphone               23%                                     12%
Email                                                 19%                                     11%
Read a magazine                               18%                                     16%
Other social networking sites              14%                                     3%
Phone calls                                         9%                                       8%
Twitter                                                 9%                                     4%
Read on a Kindle                                 8%                                      4% 

In California job-hunters will have to worry about their interviews rather than their facebook page, if emplyers request such information, as a result of two new laws that will go on the books in the coming weeks. The laws are among the 873 regular session bills Gov. Jerry Brown signed in 2012; many will take effect Jan. 1, 2013.

The social media privacy laws protect job-seekers and prospective students from sharing social media user names and password with during the application process.

Look up all of the new laws in this state database. If you need to know more about the UK position go to the Contact Me page.

United States v. Jones

The Supreme Court kicked off the year by issuing a landmark decision in United States v. Jones, a case that squarely presented the question of whether the Fourth Amendment requires the government to get a probable cause warrant to attach a GPS device to your car and secretly monitor your movements over time.  EFF teamed up with a broad range of advocates and technologists—including the inventor of GPS himself—to file a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to say "yes." 

In its majority opinion, the court decided that planting a GPS device on a car is a physical trespass that requires a warrant, but dodged the question of whether the warrantless tracking itself would violate the Fourth Amendment. But in two concurring opinions, five of the nine justices said people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements over time, and long-term location tracking without any physical trespass should require a warrant, too.  

Since the Supreme Court's decision, lower courts continue to struggle with these questions. In cases involving GPS devices installed by the police before Jones was decided, courts are still admitting GPS evidence in jurisdictions where prior case law allowed the warrantless use of the devices. But as these older cases work their way through the judicial system, warrants should soon become the legal norm for police using GPS devices in their investigations.

Courts are also confronting the question of whether law enforcement officers need a warrant to track people's movements over time. In an encouraging development, the South Dakota Supreme Court (pdf) became the first after Jones to recognize a reasonable expectation of privacy in a person's movements, hinging its decision to suppress GPS evidence on both trespass and reasonable expectation of privacy grounds.

In federal courts, the issue has played out most directly in a series of cases where the government seeks records from cell phone companies to trace the physical movements of investigatory targets. District courts have been mulling over this question for several years—with varied results. In 2011, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held that magistrate judges have the discretion to make the police get a search warrant before obtaining cell phone location records, but didn't reach the question of whether the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant in such situations. This year, two federal appeals courts squarely confronted that question.

United States v. Skinner

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held in United States v. Skinner (pdf) that a person doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in location data broadcast by a cell phone, so the Fourth Amendment doesn't require the government to get a warrant before using that information to monitor a person's real-time location. EFF and several other civil liberties organizations fought to convince the court to reconsider its decision, but it refused.

Over in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, EFF joined the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the ACLU Foundation of Texas to file an amicus brief backing a judge's decision to require the government to get a search warrant before obtaining two months of cell phone location data about a suspect. We argued the case before the Fifth Circuit in October, and are waiting for a decision.

Indeed, the cell-site issue even came up in Jones after the Supreme Court sent the case back down to the trial court, since investigators had not only used a GPS device to warrantlessly track Jones' car, but had also obtained four months of cell-site data to track the location of Jones' phone—again, without a warrant. Jones moved to suppress the evidence with support (pdf) from EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology. But just this month the district court dodged the key Fourth Amendment question, finding that the police demanded the cell-site data way back in 2005, well before the Supreme Court decided Jones. Since they had a good-faith belief that what they did was lawful at the time, the cell-site data could be admitted as evidence.

The courts aren't the only place where the battle over location privacy played out this year. State legislatures and Congress zeroed in on the issue, too.

SB 1434

In California, the state legislature passed SB 1434, an EFF- and ACLU-sponsored bill that would have required law enforcement to get a warrant before gathering location information from mobile devices and car navigation systems. Unfortunately, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the bill this fall, dashing our hopes for greater location privacy protections on the state level.

 Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act

In Congress, Senator Leahy introduced S. 1011, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act, which would generally require the government to get a warrant to collect geolocation information. And just this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of S. 1223, Senator Franken's Location Privacy Protect Act, which would require companies to inform and get consent from users before collecting or sharing their location information.  We'll likely have to wait until 2013 to see whether these bills become law.

 Nearly every major news organization has a Twitter account these days, but just how effective is the microblogging website at spreading news? 

A study of the Twitter activity of 12 major news agencies by Ram and Bhattacharya of the University of Arizona shows varying levels of success for the social network as a news-sharing tool, based on factors like article lifespan and number of retweets.

The researchers tracked what happened to a news article after it was tweeted by a news organization. Together, they looked at how many people retweeted, or reposted, the article on their own Twitter feeds, then how many times it was subsequently retweeted from those accounts and so forth.

They were then able to evaluate the volume and extend of spread of an article on Twitter, as well as its overall lifespan.

“The goal for a news agency is to have a lot of people reading and following your articles,” said Ram, who is also a professor of computer science at the UA. “What we’ve done is use network analysis, which is quite different from just looking at the total number of tweets or total number of retweets. You’re starting to see, over time, how information is spreading.”

Ram and Bhattacharya rendered the data they collected from each organization visually as images showing how the news is diffused. The network visualizations appear something like fireworks, with dots representing individual twitter users and cascade streams from those dots depicting retweets. The images reveal different diffusion patterns for the different agencies, which can provide clues to those organizations about how their news is spreading and what they might want to focus on to be successful, Ram said.

“This gives them good feedback, and it’s kind of a performance report for them,” Bhattacharya said. “It gives them an idea about the reading habits of people online and how they like to consume news.”

Stats

All of the agencies selected – The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, NPR, Reuters, Guardian, Forbes, Financial Times, Mashable, Arstechnica, Wired and Bloomberg – regularly share news articles on Twitter, which allows users to post 140-character messages as well as links to online content.

Some of the most interesting stats were that the New York Times shows a high number of users participating in long chains of tweeting and retweeting. Reuters shows a high number of users posting direct retweets of news agencies' tweets.

Of the organizations analyzed, BBC had the maximum reach in terms of affected users and retweet levels. BBC articles also had the highest chance of survival on Twitter, with 0.1 percent of articles surviving, through continual retweets, for three or more days. The BBC’s high numbers were likely due in large part to the fact that the main "bbcnews" Twitter account also is supported by two other agency accounts – "bbcbreaking" and "bbcworld," Ram said. The New York Times and Mashable had the second highest reach. Articles from Forbes, Wired and Bloomberg had the shortest Twitter lifespans.  

Comment

Overall, Ram said the data showed that articles on Twitter dissipate fairly quickly, with retweeting typically ending between 10 and 72 hours after an article is originally shared.

The Future

Ram says she hopes to do more extensive research on news sharing and develop partnerships with news agencies to help them answer specific questions about their social media practices and performance.

“The idea is really to see if we can make some predictions,” Ram said. “What are some attributes of these networks that will help us make predictions? Is it number of followers? Is it engagement of followers? Is it what time you tweet? Is it who else is tweeting at the same time? Which are the more useful attributes that will help us predict, and therefore will help us give organizations suggestions on how to be more effective in spreading their news? Because ultimately their goal is more people reading their articles and talking about them.”

Carrying on from my post yesterday   useful links for Twitter today I thought I would focus on ways to maximise your Twitter experience (for yesterdays post see (http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/1/post/2012/12/making-the-most-of-your-twitter-experience-useful-links.html).

So here it goes and enjoy!


Tips for Twitter

1. Upload a profile picture, its easier to follow and engage with a person rather than an egg. It didn't do humpty dumpty any favours...

2. Optimise your bio. You only have 160 words. Dont waste them. What is it you want to tell the world? What is important to you?

3. Put a link to your website or blog on your page. It allows people to find and link to your site more easily.

4. Select to recive an email when you get a direct message or new follower, its important to keep up to date with these things and respond to them.

5. Tweets are 120 charachters for a reason. Micro Blog on Twitter. Save the big posts for your blog on Wordpress or similar.

6.  Interact with your followers- its the whole point of Twitter!

7. Link up other sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to your Twitter-but think carefully if you want your Facebook to remain private before doing so this is expecially truw if youre tweeting as a business.

8. If you have a work Twitter or business account dont Tweet personal content on it. You wouldnt bear your soul at work so why do it to your colleagues, clients and potential clients.
 
9. Put a link to your Twitter in your email signature.

10.  Dont use splatter gun posts, think thoughtfully before you post and Tweet to those you want to generate or maintain connections with.

11. Dont engage in abusive, libelous or agressive behaviour. You wouldnt do it in Starbucks who why do it in the worlds biggest virtual coffee shop? You may run the risk of criminal sanctions if your behaviour is very bad. If in doubt hit the "Contact Me" tab above or follow the icons below and post your query.

12. Keep your content new and fresh. Tweeting the same thing over and over makes users shut off and wont look at your posts properly. This may cause them to miss out on something new or important which you do say. Dont be the boy who cried Tweet (or should that be Tweeted Tweet...?)

With social networking and other electronic communications making employees' actions and attitudes more visible than ever to employers, it's clear that there is a shift in determining where private life ends and work life begins. The line in the sand has been kicked and grains are scattered across both sides. 

A sample of 500 working people in Australia was conducted by Dr Brian Cooper from Monash University and Dr Rob Hecker from the University of Tasmania  have just conducted a survey to understand workers' awareness of employer policies and the current state of what they consider to be fair and reasonable. 

Given the potential for misunderstandings, misuse and sanctions when asked whether it was appropriate for employers to monitor the web sites visited by employees, fully 78% thought it was. Regarding employees' ability to see what discoveries are noted in their "personnel files," 72% of respondents report that they understand their rights on this important issue. However, this also means that more than a quarter of employees (28%) do not. More significantly, only a little over half (51%) are aware of how their employer uses the personal information they hold, and only 53% know who in the organization has access to it. Nonetheless, 62% are "not at all" concerned about the use and disclosure of personal information by their employer, and a further 20% are only "a little" concerned.

Perhaps this accounts for the seeming lack of demand for policies to be clearly communicated. While a majority (57%) report that their organizations have written privacy or statements for employees, 23% say they do not, and 20% do not know. And on the subject of internet usage policies, 35% of respondents say their organizations do not have a policy on internet use and another 24% say a policy exists but it has not been provided to them to review—so that 59% of those surveyed are in the dark about their organization's expectations.

Comment

Employees' use of social networks to communicate about their personal and professional lives is likelyot increase given the availability of smartphones however policies and knowledge of the issues around privacy at work do not appear to be as common or comprehensive as may have been expected given the potential for sanctions for misconduct. 

Employees need to be more aware than ever that a careless tweet, photo, or comment on their social website could have major ramifications when they return to work in the new year. And as for employers, there may be no better resolution you could make than deciding to develop, revisit, or update your social media policy. If you want to know more about creating an effecting policy click Contact Me and read Social Media-Tips for Delivering an Effective Policy which is available at http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/e-commerce.html which also contains case law and advice for employees.

Over the past few weeks media interest grew in the story surrounding a proposal by the popular app Instagram which would have made changes to its terms of service, which would have handed Instagram the rights to its users’ photos without paying a penny.

Facebook-owned Instagram had hoped to pave the way for advertising revenue but users were angered because the changes appeared to also be a landgrab, potentially allowing the company to sell the photos on without explicit authorisation. This may of course have also impacted on users rights to privacy and their understanding of what platform providers can do with their content. For a discussion of the law on this see http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/1/post/2012/12/what-a-tag-drag-zuckerberg-private-family-photo-exposed-by-facebook-sharing.html.

 Following the backlash of users, Instagram’s developers backtracked on their plans to modify the terms of service soon after they were announced. “Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did,” the company’s co-founder Kevin Systrom said in blogpost detailing their change of plan a week ago.


However latest figures from AppData suggest that some users are turning their backs on the camera app.
Nearly a quarter appeared to have stopped using the app, bought by Facebook in September for more than £600m, since the changes. AppData figures suggested that the number of active daily users fell from 16.2 million on the day the changes were announced, to 12.4 million torday, a decrease of more than 23 per cent.
However, the impact does not seem to have come immediately after the announcement, with figures relatively steady between the 15 and 16 million marks, until Christmas Day, when they fell sharply.

Want practical advice on managing your online Privacy? Look out for my new updates soon on the Tips and Links page which can be found at http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/tips-and-links.html

A man has been arrested after launching a foul-mouthed tirade against Liverpool and making offensive remarks about the Hillsborough disaster in an online video.


A police spokesman said: “Merseyside Police can confirm that a 25-year-old man has been arrested following reports about an offensive Facebook page that had been set up." They were alerted to the video on their Twitter feed.

It is understood the video clip was posted on the man’s Facebook page and later uploaded on YouTube yesterday. The police have not confirmed the identify of the man who has been held for questioning but it is understood that  his video was believed to contain rants about Scousers, calling them drug addicts and wishing them dead. The four-minute footage is also understood to include a highly offensive reference to the Hillsborough tragedy.

Merseyside Police had contacted network administrators to request for the video to be taken down.

“The Force's high tech crime unit are investigating this report and enquiries were undertaken to identify the creator of the page.

“Following on from these enquiries, a 25-year-old man from Liverpool city centre was arrested on suspicion of committing an offence under the Communications Act 2003. He has been taken to a police station for questioning.

“Officers have contacted network administrators to notify them about the page and to request its removal.”


If you want to read more about communications based offences and the law behind them see the following links:

http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/communications-based-offences.html

http://socialmedialaw.weebly.com/1/post/2012/12/a-tweet-on-the-rocks-drunken-tweets-unlikely-to-attract-criminal-prosecution-say-cps.html

Usually I blog updates on the law but since its the weekend I thought it might be useful to do a few blog posts on ways to maximise your social media experience as well as avoid falling foul of the law. Today I have out together some links for useful sites to maximise your Twitter experience.

I have also recived some requests on Twitter to cover specific questions so look out for these updates soon and a mention to those who have contributed to the discussions.

Remember there are a few ways to contribute so Tweet me via the link above or leave a comment on the contact page and ill try to answer your queries.





Looking through your Feed
Youu can of course do this on Twitter itself but there are also other options available you you depending what type of computer, phone or browser you are using.

Windows
Madtwitter; Twitteroo; Twitterlicious

Mac OS X
Twitteriffic

Linux
Deskbar; Twitux

Mobile phones
Twittter for iPhone; Twitterberry (for BlackBerries); hahlo.com (iPhone and others)

Firefox
Tweetbar

Finding people
 
Whoshouldifollow.com . Give your username, it will look for other users with some overlap with the people you follow, and suggest them as people for you to follow. Add some of the names there and then repeat the process, and you'll quickly build up a large network.

Twitdir.com, a directory. Find people, and quickly see the top 100 most-followed and busiest twitterers.

Twitterholic.com, the top users and accounts: choose, then repeat as above.

Searching and organising

Summize.com, search for a word or phrase across the entire Twitter feed. You can plug the search in and view the results; or take an RSS feed, which will automatically update when new tweets match your search.

Quotably.com creates threads of discussions between people.

Terraminds.com, another search engine, for users or phrases.

Tweetscan.com, search by user and time.

Twitterlocal.net finds twitterers near you.

Interaction

Twitthis.com, lets people looking at your site or blog share the URL via Twitter.

Twitturly.com, what's being most linked-to and talked about?

Tweetmeme.com, what sort of topics are being discussed?

Twittervision.com, real-time Google Maps mashup showing where the latest tweets are being posted.

Twitterverse, tag clouds based on the messages flowing through twitter.


Fun Links

Twistori.com, love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish: what people are saying where the tweets use those words.

Twittearth.com, processor-heavy, but fascinating, visualisation of tweets, put onto a spiralling globe.

Tweetwheel.com, which of your friends are already following each other?

Tweetspeech, Yahoo Pipes module that converts (incoming) tweets to speech, playable via RSS.

Tweeterboard, a "leaderboard" of who the busiest, most popular, most chatty users are.

Twitter fan wiki, lots more Twitter information and applications.

Twittersnooze.com, hit the "snooze button", briefly, on verbose friends.

Twitter balloon, your tweets superimposed on an image of your choosing.

Latest Scores, latest football scores, as tweets.

twerpscan.com, avoid followers who befriend everyone: may be spammers.

Earlier this year Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said he was concerned that prosecuting people for writing "offensive, shocking or disturbing" messages would have a "chilling effect" on free speech.

Whilst the most serious posts, will still attract criminal liability Mr Stramer has stated that "Prosecution should be proportionate. In a number of cases that we've seen it's clear that either once challenged or once sober the individual takes down offensive material very quickly and expresses genuine remorse. I hope through our positive dialogue with Facebook and Twitter that they might be able to support the guidelines and that therefore they might think it appropriate to take swift action." Under the new guidelines, prosecutors must demonstrate that messages on the internet are "grossly offensive", that prosecution in the public interest and that they have caused the victim "distress or anxiety".

Prosecution is likely to be unnecessary if the offending message is removed, by either the individual or service provider, and if it was not intended for a wider audience. On the 18 December 2012 Mr Stramer also announced that drunken postings would be unlikely to attract liability. Such reform to the law would potentially have come to the aid Matthew Woods. Woods, an unemployed 19-year-old from Chorley, Lancashire, who was jailed for the maximum penalty of 12 weeks imprisonment for his Facebook “joke” which he made after having some drinks at a friend’s house.  The joke was about April Jones, the missing five year old schoolgirl from Machynlleth, Wales and there was an additional joke about Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old who went missing during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007. As a result of the public reaction to his posts, Woods was arrested for his own safety after 50 people descended on his home. He pleaded guilty at Chorley Magistrates court to sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive contrary to the Communications Act 2003. Martina Jay, acting on behalf of the prosecution stated: "He started this idea when he was at a friend's house, saw a joke on Sickipedia [an online database devoted to sick jokes] and changed it slightly." The court was told Woods's Facebook page was available to a large number of people.

The prosecution did tell the Court that Woods had made the posts “in a bid to make people think his account had been hacked. He said it got out of hand" which may suggest why in mitigation, David Edwards, defending Woods noted that "in one moment of drunken stupidity placed himself as public enemy number two – behind only the person who carried out this crime." Under the new guidelines the outcome of the case may have been very different. Mr Starmer has stated that the new guidelines are envisaged to address these sorts of cases, targeting instances of serious harm and using measures other than criminal prosecution to address instances of low level offensive activity. However this still does not address what gross offence will be considered to mean or if the post has caused genuine distress and anxiety to the recipient even where it was not intended.

In terms of the future of the regulatory landscape and responsible use of social media it is important to note that freedom of expression is not synonymous with freedom from responsibility. In any case it still may be prudent for users to switch off their phone before a big night out than risk facing something much more serious than a hangover in the morning.