If you’re a student, professor, or lawyer of a certain age, you may feel a need to be on some social networking site–be it Facebook, Linked-In, or even MySpace. You might want to create one site for your friends, and another for your professional colleagues. But before jumping on, consider the business plan of a data scraper like RapLeaf:
Rapleaf [is] a people search engine that lets you retrieve the name, age and social-network affiliations of anyone, as long as you have his or her e-mail address. . . . Upscoop.com [is] a similar site to discover, en masse, [the] social networks to which the people in your contact list belong.
There’s a nice discussion at Crooked Timber. The bottom line is that you take a calculated risk when joining these sites. Even if you don’t create “bad news that follows you,” you at least generate opportunities for the nosy to unearth all manner of communications, opinions, and likes you happen to make public.Â
Addressing an identity mixup I experienced recently, Mike suggested that “the best defense is a good offense.” If you don’t want unwanted information following you around the net, make sure there’s plenty of authorized material available.  However, the strategy has its limits when someone’s up against the search engine optimizing capacity of an outfit like the New York Times. Seth Finkelstein puts the matter a bit more pointedly: “ordinary people do not want to get on the blog-evangelism gatekeeper-begging attention-mongering digital-sharecropping rat-race.”Â
As people become increasingly aware of the influence of links, expect more calls for a “a bill of rights for users of the open social web,” including:Â
Ownership of their own personal information, including: their own profile data, the list of people they are connected to, and the activity stream of content they create;
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
While there are good reasons to be wary of the propertization move implicit here, I’m on board with the “control” and “freedom” prongs.Â
Not sure if this online discussion is anymore than would take place offline. The issue becomes, as you say, the permanence of Google.
But regulating web discussion is not something I am in favor – even is we wrap it in a ‘bill of rights.’
One of the most important questions is whether the fastest growing “walled garden,” Facebook, will hear the call and reverse their claims to “ownership of the social graph.” Right now, they are avoiding all the public venues where the topic is being discussed. Here’s my coverage of the Data Sharing Summit (and Facebook no-showing there): http://therealmccrea.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/facebook-snubs-data-sharing-summit/
Comments are closed.