Privacy, Identity & Online Social Communities

September 20 2007 by The Systemic Analyst.

Frank Shaw has published an insightful commentary on his blog about “some of the challenges and opportunities of trying to recreate or create a system of social identity as we plunge headlong into online community and social networks in a faster and faster way.”

“Mostly, privacy today is a thin shield that is easily pierced. We do have some control over the way we build up or strip down our own privacy shields, but anyone who has casually built a MySpace or Facebook page or set up a blog site has left digital footprints that are going to be very hard to get rid of. Even the NYT decision to expose more of their archives in a way that pops higher in search results fuels this. So the lesson: Say something online, be prepared to eat those words forever.

Second, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Photo tagging, YouTube videos, the ability for non-techie people to take video and stream online means that even people who have gone out of their way to stay offline or to carefully monitor what goes online can no be captured, uploaded, tagged and identified pretty easily. Dave Winer wrote about this last month. Plus, because of point 1 (things that go online stay online) as we figure things out our mistakes will be highly visible for a long time.

Third, the mainstream media will, by and large, continue to miss the point. It’s really not about predators and blackmail, but the preservation and analysis of our virtual footprints and what they mean/don’t mean about us. It’s not the *single* event that is newsworthy, it’s the combined set of events that we need to deal with.

Finally, the focus on starting by better tuning the ability to control what is exposed via social networking sites is the right place to start. There is no doubt that a huge amount of personal data is now being shared on Facebook and other sites, and the default settings are, to put it mildly, “open.” If these aren’t fixed (and I’m sort of skeptical they will be, since the road to revenue is via shared personal information for a site like Facebook), the not only will things get worse before they get better, but they might just not get better.” Click here for more.

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