by rpongsaj
Yesterday Sebastian Küpers had a really great and thoughtful post about privacy and the context in which we are saying and writing things on the web. Who are we addressing? Just our friends, our co-workers, or the general public? He muses if real world examples of context and (supposed) privacy can be transferred to the internet. Sebastian gives a really descriptive example:
If you are an average Twitter user, who has his tweets public and a few dozen friends, you absolutely are able to overlook who is listening to you and this will have an impact on what you say on Twitter. If you compare it with the real world, it’s maybe like being on a private party with an “open-door-policy”, where theoretically everybody could show up, if he knows that the party is taking place.
You know what kind of people will be at this party, this will impact on what you might say or how you behave (or how much you will drink
) in this context – you will show the people who are there a “persona” of you – and even if it’s possbile that for example your boss or your mother could show up – because it has open doors and let’s eveybody in, this will not affect you, because the probability is way to low.
So this “natural” barrier, that it is quite unlikely that your boss or your mom will know about this party – and even if they would, that they would spend the time and the effort to actually go there. is such high that it protects you and your privacy in this special context.
So is this metaphor really tranferable to the internet?
This is really a difficult question. There are aggregators like Friendfeed and, of course, search engines which make almost everything public we publish on the web. We have not much control about who can see and read what we write and say. So the easy answer is: Don’t publish anything you don’t want Google to find.
However this could restrict us in our actions if we always had to consider who might read our blog posts and tweets. In the end we were not authentic anymore. In the comments of Sebastian’s post I outlined a possible solution. It’s very hypothetical and I have no idea if it could work or not:
Of course, we could establish a standard for feeds which includes some kind of license policy. Basically, feeds would be encrypted or made unusable by other methods unless someone else had a key, token, whatever to make it readable. It would also (or only, without encryption) include a Creative Commons kind of license which declares if the feed is shareable. The token for decryption would be given by users to their friends, websites,… Probably, it was also possible to do some kind of whitelisting of OpenIDs who would be granted access to the feed. This whitelist could be hosted by my OpenID provider. The feed would also include something like robots.txt for search engines.
It is just a rough sketch. Though, quite honestly, I am not really sure if the problem can be solved. This approach would require much discipline by all parties involved. But maybe this is also a use case the EULA & ToS Task Force of the DataPortability project can focus on. Do we need such a solution or should we accept that privacy standards are changing and we will all become public individuals?
