Web 2.0 and your privacy

November 4, 2006 in Web by Carsten Pötter | View Comments

New and exciting web services are launched almost daily and they are easy to use. It is even easier to sign up for them. Mostly users just have to provide a valid email address, a username and a password and with another click they are able to use the services. Great. Of course, those services also offer a user profile page where people can leave more detailed information about themselves and/or the way they want to use the service. Nothing wrong with that. In the end it is the user who decides which information is publicly available. So nothing to worry about?

What about this situation? You sign up to 30 Boxes and suddenly you see your Flickr photos on 30 Boxes’ webtop? How come they know about your Flickr account? Not that difficult really. Same email address, same username and the wonders of open APIs and suddenly one company knows more about you than you have actually told them when signing up. The link to the Flickr account can be deleted but it made me think.
Google, Google Maps, Google Reader, GMail, Google Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets,… Is there any service Google don’t provide? They seem to be everywhere on the web. You just can’t escape them and mostly their services are among the best you can find. Also you can use all of them with the same email address and password. It won’t get more convenient on the net. So it makes sense staying with just one company, doesn’t it? But what do they do with all the information they collect? Showing adds on GMail that fit your email’s content. Anything else? I don’t know. Maybe too much information in the hands of just one company.
Ah, at least Flickr, del.icio.us and Upcoming.org don’t belong to Google. There is no G in front of the name. Correct. It seems you don’t have to fall back on Google to use three of the most popular new services. That’s phantastic. Really? All three services belong to Yahoo! by now. Another big player in the game.
Isn’t it great that Amazon offer you books that might interest you? Great customer service.Yes, because they collect information about your purchases. Well, not just about the purchases you made from Amazon. If you click through the items you might be interested in, you can tell Amazon that you are not interested in a certain item or that you already own it.

There is probably too much information on the companies’ servers to connect everything and create detailed profiles which can identify a certain user. But if you read blogs like TechCrunch or Read/Write Web (or even this blog) and see articles about exciting new services, please have your privacy in mind and think about which information you want to share. Always read the terms of service (yes, it is boring), maybe create a disposable email account for testing purposes, use different user names for each service, whatever. Be creative.
Though don’t be paranoid (staying offline is the way to go if you are) and have fun surfing the web. Just have your brain working while doing so.

If you want to read more on the topic, check the very critical article by Wil Harris on bit-tec.

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  • Carsten Pötter
    Nein, bei 30 Boxes hat das tatsächlich nichts mit Cookies zu tun. Und natürlich kommen die Daten von Flickr. Im Prinzip ist es das gleiche wie mit Startseiten ala Netvibes und deren Modulen; nur dort muss ich ein entsprechendes Modul oder eben einen RSS Feed explizit meiner Startseite hinzufügen. Bei 30 Boxes werde ich erst gar nicht gefragt und das kann dann schon mal für eine kleine Überraschung sorgen.

    Ich finde 30 Boxes nach wie vor unglaublich gut und vielseitig. Sie gehen aber einen Weg, den man zumindest mal mit Vorsicht betrachten sollte: Social Reputation System und die Buddy Cards.
  • Thomas H.
    Naja, ich dachte halt. Freundschaftsdienst und so. Der Punkt mit dem ruinösen ist eigentlich schon der ausschlaggebende.

    Was mir noch einfiel war, dass vielleicht die Cookies schuld sind. Ich lösche meine so gut wie nie, weil ich zu faul bin, immer wieder die Passwörter einzugeben. Offenes API und dann einfach nur als Box oder Script irgendwo in die Seite eingebaut und schon denkt man, die haben deine Daten, obwohl es immer noch vom Flickr Server geladen ist.
    Könnte sein. Muss nicht.
  • Carsten Pötter
    1) Sometimes data is the only real asset a company has, so sharing it with (or give access to) employees of a competitor would be 1) a violation of most companies own privacy rules and 2) ruinous.

    2) It is usual that employees know each other. Nothing special about it.
  • Thomas H.
    It's well known, that the Flickr guys have very deep contacts to Google. IIRC, I read somewhere that the offices are just a few miles or so away from each other. And the cake sent from the IE Team to the Mozilla guys (http://fredericiana.com/2006/10/24/from-redmond...), shows that they know each other personally and are not people who live at opposite side of the earth.

    My guess is, that all these guys sometime get access not only to the software, but also the data in some way. Be it Adsense or whatever crap google or anyone else sells.

    The internet of today is not necessarily a competion ground as it used to be 7 years ago!
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