Privacy on the read-write web
Do you have a weblog? Like to journal online? Share pictures or bookmarks online with friends and family, for example, using Flickr or Del.icio.us?
What kind of privacy can you possibly retain? Is it possible to keep your activities anonymous?
- no one can track down your full name, address, etc., and pin your comments and photos back to YOU;
- it’s effectively impossible for anyone to show up at your door — or your employer — with a complaint about your content
- a future employer or school or volunteer organization can’t track down all your diverse rants while evaluating your application.
True anonymity is not something you can count on maintaining. Let’s say you write a weblog, but you diligently keep your last name out of it. As soon as anyone in the world — maybe a proud friend or your Mom — links to you and spells out your name… there goes anonymity. Have you setup your digital camera with your name? When you upload pictures to the web, your full name might be in the jpg exif data.
Try to get your brain around the contradictions in a rather personal post I stumbled across recently: “Is it possible to get some … privacy on the Internet?” The author is tired of people who use LiveJournal “to manipulate more than anything else,” and switches to Blogger to step away and “create less drama.” But she proceeds to journal through the questions of a potential unexpected pregnancy, on a site which like much of the weblog universe is easily searchable with Blogsearch. Hmmm.
This is a real teaching issue for all the kids in MySpace, Xanga and LiveJournal. And for all us who start out on Blogger. As Lauren Pressley writes in her library blog:
As people get more used to the read/write web, it will become even more important to include training about soft privacy in information literacy education. I think information literacy will expand to include not only doing good research & thinking critically, but also understanding the information context within which you participate (as in yes, someone will look you up and might see your profile) ….
(See the rest of Lauren’s posts on “soft privacy“.)
K.G. Schneider says
Kids these days! They blog, they IM, they share information on Friendster, Flickr, and MySpace. Increasingly the personal has become public. Many of us traditional librarians have a very firm idea of patron privacy that may seem quaint to the young ones. But two key components of “soft privacy” are awareness and control.
Given that you can’t count on remaining anonymous once you publish on the web, it’s important to think about using a service or software that lets you control the same kind of basic public/private decisions that Flickr has built-in for photo-sharing. For example, is this article to be marked:
- public
- friends only
- family only
- friends and family, or
- me only
But how can friends and family identify themselves to each other? Glad you asked. That’s why “portable identity” matters on the internet. It’s one of the big items for which there is not an adequate answer today. Typically everyone ends up registering locally on each other’s sites, but that’s a pain, with the proliferation of ids. Or everyone hangs out on the same social network for awhile, but eventually that feels a bit confining.
On the topic of portable identity, Dick Hardt did a fabulous presentation at OSCON 2005 — check it out. He says that “Web 2.0 will be one of the big drivers for Identity 2.0. We already have things like InfoCard’s Metasystem, Lightweight Identity (LID), OpenID (good for blogs?), passel, OpenSAML, and SXIP.” Dick references Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog for good ideas.
Initially my reaction was, “Hey, that’s a different topic than managed privacy on the read-write web. Dick’s talking about how I can be in control of proving who I am to the plethora of systems and sites I use.” But then I realized that to manage who can read MY part of the web, I need an easier way to express who MY friends are.
Over at manageability.org, I liked this observation:
It’s … ironic that the social network that enables privacy also works against it. After all, who you share with and who you watch are sometimes private and personal. … So, in the end the fact that people know that you have an account invades your own privacy. But isn’t that what sharing is all about? That is, revealing a bit of your personal life.
It helps to remember that, unless you’ve unlisted your number, your name & address are probably already out there. Your blog or photo site makes your opinions and activities more visible to the world. What are you saying in public? Be aware of it, and exercise some self-control.
Related Reading:
- Trends to Watch in 2006 (bokardo.com)
- The Web 2.0 Revolution Spawns Offshoots (web2.wsj2.com)
- Privacy on the Web: Is it Possible Any Longer? (TechnologyExpert)
Privacy policy
- Electronic Privacy Principles (cpsr.org)
- Privacy in Cyberspace: Rules of the Road for the Information Superhighway (privacyrights.org)
