The Mandelbear's Musings

Between Friends: The Perils of Centralized Blogging | Electronic Frontier Foundation

One of the paradoxes of current social software is how many of your closely-guarded secrets you are obliged to entrust to a third party. Take the social blogging site LiveJournal: its centralized server allows you to set blog posts to "friends only" or "private". To use this feature, you post these semi-confidential journal entries to LiveJournal's server, and rely on it to hide your thoughts from the most of the world using its centrally-maintained list of friends to control access. LiveJournal holds your secret data in trust, as much as you trust it to keep your public data available.

We give these companies a great deal of control over our privacy and our speech - and even if we trust that company with those responsibilities now, there are no guarantees that the pressures upon and motivations of that company will stay constant over time.

It's not just blogging sites, of course, as the recent Facebook fiasco demonstrates. Here's another Facebook incident (giving information to a user's employer), and an analysis of Beacon on Techdirt. There was a segment on KQED's Forum this morning about it -- I'll update the link as soon as they post the podcast version. (updated 12/7)

My online habits and assumptions were formed in the wide-open era of Usenet before the rise of the Web, where you didn't have to behave as if anything you posted would be public: that's how the system worked. The web has made it possible for people to think that a public website might keep some of their information private. Experience has shown that it's rarely a good assumption. Just because you're paying someone to take care of your data -- or your posessions -- doesn't mean they won't suddenly turn on you.