My niece is in her early 20s and recently finished university keeps a running commentary on her social life on her Bebo account, she isn’t doing anything terrible.. but it is all abit silly and seems to involve alcopops a lot, but it is very different from the open conversations the ‘technology commentators’ are having. Us technology comentators are not typical.

I think this is important, that we don’t take the exceptional examples of the use of social data from the A-list bloggers and early adopters and extrapolate that because Robert Scoble is fine with that, then everybody else should be.

I agree Usenet is a poor example of this, I think the lack of privacy was transparent, but this becomes much muddier when talking about social network applications, there is a veneer of privacy and control, no matter that it isn’t explicit in the EULA – and probably doesn’t exist.

But thats the conflict, social networks need data to be shared, thats where the power comes from, and its where the money can be made.

The recent ho-hah about facebook and Beacon shows that its something that needs to be understood. Where leverage of benefit from accumulated social data is in conflict with the desires or comfort zone of the people sharing then there is a great danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

In my own organisation I keep my ‘whereabouts’ up to date and tagged to my directory entry but its a choice and some people choose not to do so, it makes the whereabouts function work less well.

I’m always rather concerned about the people who don’t have public whereabouts – it certainly suggests that social networks in the enterprise may not work as well as could be projected from their success in the outside world, but it can’t be mandatory because that would kill the benefits we do get from it.

Clear ownership and straightforward opt-in usage statements are the only way this can work.

… I’d add in my defence though that since I did highlight “Which bits of the data are mine is a different issue.” it’s not so much me coming around to your view, as a joint realisation that we may both agree…

Incidentally, I wasn’t a tech in the mid 90s (and still ain’t now )but I would have said I was a fairly early adopter. There was lots of fuss about Deja in the groups I frequented; I remember warning guys in my team that anything they said could be found. Be that as it may…

I think we’re now only disagreeing about what should be released; and how it should be controlled. I think that’s another post. So, I’ll think about that and post in the next day or so.

You can reasonably suppose that said mid-90s Goth didn’t know about deja and didn’t know about x-no-archive, etc. He wasn’t a tech, he was just a kid with access to a computer. That seems to be the closest thing to a realistic hypothesis about the Goth kid and what he knew about Usenet. The problem in regard to Google is that it takes keystrokes and turns them into actions that are publicized all over the planet and for the rest of time. Even minor felons get their records expunged after a couple of years of good behavior. The penalties imposed by Google are far more severe and I don’t hold with the libertarian view that everyone is fully informed and fully rational in these matters. Actually, the Goth kid’s post would never have been noticed outside deja if Google hadn’t take deja over and then started started websearching its Usenet archive. No amount of rational consideration of the matter would have prepared him to see his posting to alt.goth.suicide 1st on the list under a search of his name. (By the way, someone else might have quoted him, in which case he’ll never make the post go away.)

Re tags, you seem to be coming around to my view. I just push it a little further. I think everything should be taggable as not visible and not for use outside facebook and the default should be zero visibility and zero for use outside facebook. I’ve noticed in some of the discussion of Web 2.0 site design that opt-outs should be made difficult. Just as I’d expected.

I’m a bit puzzled with you and Sandy both chatting about Usenet and expectations of privacy… I was posting then and I was well aware of Deja News – surely you both remember that.

Sure, you could X-No-Archive posts – and I gather you still can; should we have made that default? I don’t know, but that horse has bolted… unless the Goth was X-No-Archiving

Content that you provide is easily removed from google stuff that you have posted elsewhere… less so I guess. I know some folk delete all their posts on forums – which should remove them from google on next spider… and, of course, you can robots.txt the spider/slurpbots away.

I suppose that brings us neatly back to tagging your information.
Would a tag on your information do?
I mean, I don’t mind anyone knowing the email address I provide *to* Facebook – but my membership of Kilt Wearers is probably best for Facebook… so:
s hai do sai at my mailprovider[share]
Kilt Wearers[FacebookOnly]

Default it to.. what you will?

The contributions I was making to the net in the mid-early 90s are still about, I just googled a 12 year old usenet post I made about the use of sitar in the Yardbirds for instance. I’m not embarrassed about this – well, not much – but then I had no expectations of privacy when I made it. The usage and control were inherent in the medium.

However when the data is more personal or behavioural and the third party usage is less transparent then the level of control becomes important. I don’t see anyone, private or public being able to do that… It’ll all end in tears I tell ya!

Let me further remark that the evolution of the search engines has taken Google from being your benign friend who produces information in response to just a few key strokes to an all-seeing eye under whose gaze we cower in fear and make very certain that our public postures, i.e., the things we do that come under Google’s notice, aren’t significantly disturbing to employers, significant others, our friends, relatives and the wider society. And it’s hard to say that what doesn’t seem disturbing or offensive now wont’ be taken as offensive in the future. There are always small shifts in the culture that turn almost everything into a sensitive topic. It doesn’t take long and it doesn’t take much.

Some people may be happy to twitter all day, but there are many areas of employment where too much visible Internet presence is considered a “negative”. Sometimes people accumulate a comet’s trail of Internet presence after their names inadvertently because they had the crazy idea for one week of starting a blog. Sometimes they had to obtain information from a forum. It then becomes something that will follow them to death like an incredibly ugly tattoo. All of this makes me think of the related phenomena of tattoos and piercings. Who wants to turn 35, 40 or 50 and still have that clutter on?

If when I have my contacts *I* can say, “Hey guys, let’s leave Facebook and its intrusive Beacon model” or Orkut/Bebo/MySpace and whatever I dislike that’s well and good – and no, I don’t necessarily want to retype all that information…

But if you don’t want me to have your information – currently all you can do is not give it to me; unless we move to a model of trust and understanding of which data is yours, which mine, and which communal.

It is rather moving away from who *owns* the social networks though… which is what this was about; unless you feel that the SNS are “too important to be owned by private hands”…

This is the key question.

I absolutely agree with rapleafwatch if, by “reconstructing your social graph”, it means taking your list of contacts and then importing them into Orkut, where these contacts are turned into user accounts. If you wish to take your contacts list and Orkut just lets you import them in as a data list, and then does nothing (no email from orkut saying, “your friend has joined Orkut, would you like to join?” even) apart from maybe check through the list to see if any are already members, and it is part of your non-public-exposed profile, then that would be something I would find acceptable.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that surveillance of social networks could get to your corporate email address and all the messy details of your work life, but I’m content to intimate it. Again, I find that stalkeresque.

As for your niece, my g/f texts and I call her back and tell her to cut it out. It’s a girl thing.

I was thinking that goldfish are peculiarly transparent, so it was not a slip when I chose that particular spelling. Perhaps that was overreaching. But I do believe that there’s a very small number of people who prefer what you call openness, but their visibility conveys an impression that it’s something everyone wants.

Again, although you wouldn’t want to force my curtains, I think when you put me into Orkut, then you’ve forced me to open my curtains to Orkut, or do I misunderstand your notion of reconstructing your social graph in Orkut?

Asking me if I feel that I’ve exposed more than I want is like asking if I have anything to hide. No more than the next person, but I don’t really care to expose stuff I’ve put into Facebook beyond Facebook. It’s in Facebook because I’ve made a conscious choice to put it in Facebook and *not* elsewhere. It’s not that my fingers would wear out after typing invites to my friends in some other SNS.