Not long ago I wrote about the rise of social networks and the mass-adding of complete strangers to our social circles. Back in January I wrote about the price we’re now paying for our desire to move so much of our lives online. In The Price of Social Networking & The New Internet, I said:
The one thing that people seemed to have forgotten about, nay, tossed aside, in their online endeavors is the idea of privacy. We’ve got profiles full of pictures, movies, intimate details, lists of our friends, playlists of what we’re listing to, cookies full of our web-surfing habits, lists of our email addresses, and search engines that are all to happy to reveal our every whim online.
One of the technologies spurring this loss of privacy is the search engine crawler. Unless you keep your personal information locked inside a “wall garden” site, like Facebook, search engines are more than happy to get in there and index your entire life. As companies like Google and Yahoo! get better at indexing information, more and more of the information that was never meant to be included in publically-searchable databases finds its way into their hands.
Now it seems that Google, whose self-proclaimed mission is to index all of the world’s information, is thinking about or working on some sort of social network aggregator. In a rather long and technical outline of his current thoughts on the issue, LiveJournal founder turned Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick talks about bringing the world’s information - including that of social networks like Facebook - together into one, huge backend to power an endless number of future web applications.
If anyone can pull something like this off, it’s Google. They’ve shown with Google News that they can aggreagate huge amounts of information into an easy-to-use resource. Now as Fitzpatrick points out, the goal here is not to create another social network (or even a tool that’s “fun” for users to play with). The goal is create “the guts” of a system that can be used to “merge little isolated social graphs into one big social graph and spread it far and wide, for all to enjoy”.
Am I the only one that doesn’t want their “social graph” merged and spread for all to enjoy?
As an example of what Google is thinking, Brad offers the following scenario as an example:
A user should then be able to log into a social application (e.g. dopplr.com) for the first time, ideally but not necessarily with OpenID, and be presented with a dialog like,
“Hey, we see from public information elsewhere that you already have 28 friends already using dopplr, shown below with rationale about why we’re recommending them (what usernames they are on other sites). Which do you want to be friends with here? Or click ’select-all’.”
Now when did who I have friended on other sites, in address books, and wherever else they hope to pull this information from become “public information”? Sure… if you know how you can find all of this stuff out anyway. But I sorta like the idea of most people not being able to do that. And I like the idea of Company A not knowing what I’ve got going on at Company B.
As usual I think we’ve got another instance of Google thinking it’s helping when, in reality, it’s just creating yet another privacy nightmare. Did you hear about the recent street-level photography the company started adding to it’s Maps service? Oh yeah… they’re driving around the country taking 360 degree photos of what one would see from the street. Except that in meantime they’re taking pictures of people naked in the windows, peeing on the side of the road, and making out. Yeah… anyone walking down the street would have seen this, too. But a handful of people in the area is different than millions of Google users.
Maybe I’m over-reacting (it wouldn’t be the first time… haha). But stop and ask yourself if you really want all of your social information being aggregated into one service that any service can plug in to?
Maybe I’m holding onto the idea of privacy… when none really exists.
One Comment
Yeah, but isn’t it fair to have this two-way communication? If you’re there on the street and you see someone doing “their own thing”, there is a chance that they might see you watching them, correct? So, if you’re able to go online a see those 360 degree street photos including someone doing “their own thing”, shouldn’t everybody else be able to access your information also? Share for none or share for all. I don’t like the idea myself, but I’m just playing the devil’s advocate here.