Your Life Being Served - To Everyone
We all have read stories about job applicants being rejected or people being outright fired for revealing a little bit too much about themselves on social networking platforms, photo sharing sites, or other public web sites. Our private lives are increasingly lived in the open and not everything that seemed to be a good idea and fun then is helping us later when things are taken out of context or simply misused for purposes never intended.
I recently attended a very interesting Diamond Exchange conference where one of the keynote speakers was David Reed. David is a world-renowned researcher at the MIT Medial Lab’s Viral Communication Group, former chief scientist of Lotus Corp., and the father of Reed’s law (that states that the utility of networks grows exponentially with the number of participants). He introduced to us his vision for Web 3.0 – an always-connected world where people communicate freely, where instantaneous groups form in geographic locations, and where communication devices are shared and readily accessible in public and private spaces.
Naturally the discussion quickly turned towards issues of privacy, security, and the implications of the rich data that can be gathered in such a world. Studies and experiments have shown that even today amazing insights about people can be gathered by examining their social networks and inferring information from their connections, activities, and interactions.
What would a super-connected world of the future look like where every movement, every proximity to people or places and almost every social interaction is somehow enabled, supported, or simply tracked by service providers or government agencies? David believes that there is a need to create rules, regulations, and standards that would make the collection, storage, and further use of such data transparent and user controllable.
I think that this idea is very profound and will be central to establishing this brave new world of communication.
Many people are already overwhelmed with how to control their privacy in a myriad of places with different control settings and policies. Even if one is the most ardent manager of their own social media world and on top of all privacy settings at twenty different social networking sites they cannot influence someone else posting and tagging that particularly embarrassing photo from when they were 18. Professional media has for a long time known the need for signed releases and consent – our networked world does not.
So what is the solution here? I believe there need to be regulations and laws that will allow us to regain some control about our lives by establishing standards to control the use of our social data. I think of it as somewhat of a series of pre-addressed digital envelopes that one will send to everyone who gathers social data. These envelopes would allow people to specify what data about themselves can be put into it, to whom it can be addressed to and what the addressees can do with it. It would also require all social media gatherers to keep track of what was done with that data and allow people to subscribe to be informed (pre or post) of the intended use of their data.
Obviously there is a need for automation so privacy clearinghouses could make automated decisions on my behalf, following my instructions. I believe that there is a business proposition here to establish these clearinghouses that would facilitate this federated identity and privacy management process and help me keep track of possible infractions. I bet people (or advertisers) would pay money for the peace of mind that I would know – or better even proactively stop – the posting of a picture tagged with my name that I prefer be kept private.
Google just this last week released Google Dashboard, a site that pulls all privacy and usage information that Google collects at their different properties into one place. This is a step in the right direction. We now need someone who does this across properties and laws and regulations that allow us to regain some control over our digital lives. The fine lines between the rights of privacy and freedom of speech, over-regulation, and the ability to innovate are where the challenges to solve this problem will lie.