the internet always endangered privacy

Another one I found through Danah… connected selves: Buying and Selling the Little Black Book.

Esther was one of the VCs at a recent “under the radar” event — basically a “social software meets WWF” face-off between LinkedIn, Spoke, VisiblePath, and ZeroDegrees. At the time she seemed really concerned with two things: protecting data and avoiding the situation where you have to reject a referral (the you-are-not-my-friend rejection that no one wants to do on Friendster).

Both are a form of privacy. Recently at Spoke we developed a system that spiders the web for information about people to further enrich the social network (especially around searching). Now if someone searches for “OpenSymphony” I show up — even though no person in the network states that I am associated with OpenSymphony.

It’s not that any of these social software companies are exposing more data than existed before (in some cases they are), but the bigger fear is that they are lowering the ease of access to data that was always there.

Google did this a couple years ago. Before Google, who would have been able to find out that in 1996 I used Fractal Painter (?!?). It’s not that Google is invading my privacy — it has just lowered the access to already public information.

In the future companies like Spoke might be able to use information found all over the web — not just the raw who-knows-who data — to build very rich graphs. Like all information, if not properly checked, it could lead to the perception of serious privacy problems.

I say perception because nothing new is being exposed. In 1997 someone could have found that newsgroup post of mine if he or she tried hard enough. Likewise, if someone connects the dots they can figure out pretty much my entire life history via various public newsgroups, mailing lists, blog comments, blog posts, and websites.

Is it scary that in the future all the information that a private investigator might have gathered can now be accessed with a mouse click? Yes. Does it mean that we should all be careful about what we let leak on to the internet? Yes. Does it mean that social networking companies (or Google for that matter) are evil? No. Does it mean they should take privacy seriously and do everything they can to protect the consumer? Of course. Should that be their duty (by law)? That’s yet to be determined.