Privacy Jungle (cont)

Enjoyed the discussion yesterday on the Privacy Jungle.

The overall thing that came accross, was that privacy is not done very
well by most of the social networking sites covered in the study.
However the majority of people dont seem to see this as a "show
stopper", and about the quarter feel strongly about privacy will make
their views known probably on thier own channel.

I liked the idea of giving a score to each of the sites, based on
various selected criteria.

I would potentially consider using this score in a distributed network
to decide what data I'd like to share with various sites.

As most sites are currently quite insular, and rarely allow links in
and out, it wont have a huge practical use immediately.  However, we
are seeing that sites are becoming more federated, both using
proprietry technologies and more open patterns.  Gmail was mentioned
yesterday, is a subtle example of a social net (if its not considered
one now it probably will be soon) that allows connections to other
nets (eg via gtalk and webchat), and automatically harvests your
contacts list to your "GProfile", which does allow connections to be
made outside (however almost in every form except URI!).

Perhaps an incentive for sites to take more interest in privacy would
be some kind of public, independent, machine readable, scoring system?
 Federeated networks can then overlay their own scoring system onto
the base values, and decide how they want to interact with other
networks.  For example, I might not want to share my photos with
facebook (due to the caching on 3rd party networks discussed
yesterday), but would be happy to share my tweets.

Did anyone else have feedback on the session?

Received on Thursday, 2 July 2009 10:35:12 UTC