Bruce Schneier's "A Revised Taxonomy of Social Networking Data"

Hello, 

Bruce Schneier blogged [1] about his revision to his taxonomy of social networking data today. He has identified the following characteristics for social networking data: 

"
Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.

Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.


Entrusted data is what you post on other people's pages. It's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over the data once you post it -- another user does.


Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over it, and you didn't create it in the first place.


Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.


Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you're likely gay yourself.
" - Bruce's blog [1]


The addition he made to the taxonomy was the inclusion of the 6th field "Derived Data", which is probably due to work undertaken at MIT, referred to as project Gaydar, [2] where they showed that they could analyse public facebook profile pages to identify people's sexual preferences. 

So, finally, I am rather interested in fifth class identified above as : "Behavioral data", which I feel is being abused by this new phenomenon that is the facebook like button, and how it is being plastered all over the web. I feel that it is just another tool for the company to gather, surreptitiously, behavioural data about their users, in a method which is analogous to "opt-out" based marketing which we are seemingly eradicating from printed forms. I have ranted about this on my blog [3].

Anyways, bye for now, 

Mischa 

[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/08/a_taxonomy_of_s_1.html
[2] http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2611/2302
[3] http://mmt.me.uk/blog/2010/07/30/the-facebook-like-button/
___________________________________
Mischa Tuffield PhD
Email: mischa.tuffield@garlik.com
Homepage - http://mmt.me.uk/
Garlik Limited, 1-3 Halford Road, Richmond, TW10 6AW
+44(0)845 645 2824  http://www.garlik.com/
Registered in England and Wales 535 7233 VAT # 849 0517 11
Registered office: Thames House, Portsmouth Road, Esher, Surrey, KT10 9AD