Brave New Worldwideweb2.0

Amidst the clamour and frenzy that surrounds whichever star currently shines brightest in the web2.0 firmament (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace et al), it seems that some old-fashioned principles have fallen by the way-side.

Long before the WWW, in the dark years of WW2, our governments took pains to warn us of the perils of spilling our beans too readily. ‘Walls have ears’, we were reminded. ‘Loose lips sink ships’, the posters warned. Citizens were urged to be vigilant about what they might be giving away even in casual conversation. After all, piece together a few bits of seemingly innocuous information and before long a more telling picture emerges.

Sixty years on, and such cares are far from our minds of course. As each shiny new social networking site comes along, we’re happy to reveal all in exchange for a ticket to ride on The Next Big Thing. Once aboard, we do it all over again by giving it up for our 2479 new best ‘friends’.

Of course, if your life is a public free-for-all then this doesn’t matter. But there is a very real issue here for those of us trying to reconcile the unlimited connectedness offered by today’s web with lingering concerns about where this is all going.

After all, there are plenty of people who value your personal information, even if you don’t.

The problem is that to be in control of your privacy requires you to trust the people you hang out with. Thus the current crop of social networking sites will never be able to provide reasonable, controllable privacy to its users until they understand that meaningful relationships between people are earned, not collected like Christmas tree baubles. Without the element of mutual trust which is intrinsic to ‘real’ relationships, privacy is not possible.

So what does it even mean to be a ‘friend’ these days? Is it enough for a virtual stranger to simply peruse your online profile and send you an invitation? In times past, a friend was someone with whom you shared mutual trust and affection. Not any longer. Now we open up our lives to all and sundry on the web, blissfully unaware (or at best only dimly aware) of what we’re revealing to the world at large. That this has become the norm is perhaps understandable, at least from the perspectives of the web companies themselves:

1. Unfettered exposure of users drives exponential growth and advertising revenues,
2. It’s technically much easier not to bother designing and implementing meaningful privacy controls. (I speak from 1st hand experience on this particular point!).

No, what is perhaps more concerning is the way that many people seem all too ready to wander unthinkingly into an online world where everything is knowable by everyone.

“The tools used to manage privacy and sharing online remain crude and inflexible compared with the nuanced way we handle real-life social networks, and we are going to have to learn to deal with the new modes of social engagement that result.” – Bill Thompson, in an article for the BBC

Is it not time to bring ‘social networking’ back to a personal level? A level on which your online friendships reflect your real-life friendships? Shouldn’t a meaningful social network understand that real-life is rich and that you’re part of many different groups of people? That you don’t necessarily want to lump your mates/colleagues/family/relatives/clients into one amorphous blob where everyone can see everyone and everything, to say nothing of the outside world?

In short, don’t you think trust between friends online should be as highly valued as between friends in your real-life?

 

Postscript: Another take – We’re all celebrities in the post-privacy age (Stuff magazine)

 

More pics: http://www.sangrea.net/free-cartoons/privacy-cartoons.html