Comments on: Privacy and revocation: two sides of the same coin – a new privacy model for the social web

By: Stephen James

Stephen James — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:21:07 +0000

It seems that there is a false either/or choice lingering here. Either completely closed or completely open. Even in the context of a social network, where the members are not completely vetted, I would want to have some information held close to the vest, so to speak. I see nothing wrong with getting/having to control who gets to my most personal information.

By: Ajit Jaokar

Ajit Jaokar — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:02:06 +0000

Thanks Stefan. I am also following the open social networks ideas with great interest. shall blog more soon rgds Ajit

By: Stefan Weiss

Stefan Weiss — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:35:37 +0000

Good to read that the challenge of enhancing the privacy of social network users get more attention at different fronts. However, your suggestion of revocing somebody’s access or viewing rights of your profile information only covers a small part of what information privacy actually requires. And in some social networks such as XING this type of setting functionality already exists. But information privacy goes way beyond that. The data portability initiatives today do not truly address privacy issues but rather only cover viewing and access rights. You can possibly revoce somebody’s viewing rights to your profile but what happens to the personal data you provided to one social network once that data is exported to some application developer or is scrapped from the site by an unauthorized individual? Unless we develop new methods to attach data purpose and certain usage rights to each personal data set, we will continue to care about information privacy only on the surface. At the same time personal data in all kinds of forms is spread without any kind of control by the original owner of the data. I would be interested to discuss these issues at the WebCamp event in Ireland but I am afraid I cannot be there in person. Hope to be able to follow the discussions here.

By: Pravin Tamkhane

Pravin Tamkhane — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:11:10 +0000

“Innocent until proven guilty” that says it all. Rather than trying to build a closed digital fortress, making revocation more strong will certainly make social networks more “social”. I mean, I really don’t like concept of getting introduced to a unknown person on linkedin.com through the people I know. The whole reason I am there on linkedin.com is to get in touch with those whome I don’t and NOT to whom I know already. And I think same applies for other social networks.
Great article!
Thanks, Pravin

By: Anthony Mullen

Anthony Mullen — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:21:10 +0000

Agree with the innocent until proven guilty approach. Rejection may even have a couple of reasons rather than the monolithic catchall of ‘reject’.
To ramp up the ‘policing’ of those who spam or wildly friendadd the social network should keep tabs /stats on who is being rejected and why. That way pruning of the network (using collective intelligence about spammers) could happen either in an automated way or via admin intervention.
I would also be interested in further automated tools that ‘find my time wasters’ which could be ran over my communications on the social network i.e. identify all those who post to me but I don’t post to them OR identify senders that I only scan their message for <2 seconds etc
I want my social networking ‘automated butler’ to help me manage the front door.
p.s. your preview message function doesn’t prompt for the catchpa “who publishes open gardens”