Staying private in public

2008-05-30 09:26

Alistair Fairweather

Ever wondered how many digital versions of yourself are floating around out there? I know I have, and in my case it's in the thousands. Over the years I've dutifully filled in my name, birthday, postal code and cereal preference, all in the hope of winning prizes, seeing amusing videos and, more recently, connecting with my friends.

The really annoying thing though, is retyping the same old stuff, over and over, whenever some pimpled billionaire-in-waiting launches a system that will, surely, bring eternal happiness.

Anyone with a profile on more than one site will be familiar with questions like "what's my password again?" or "Did I invite Jenny to the party on Facebook or Bebo? Or was it Blueworld?" Enter our ever-resourceful Silicone Valley saviours and their latest pet phrase - data portability.

Essentially, data portability means the ability for you to move your details - including complex stuff like who you're friends with, and who you despise - to any site you choose. At heart it means giving you back control of your personal information - which sounds only fair.

Not so simple

Of course it's not as simple as all that. The more independent software geeks have been all for portability from the word go. They've been singing it's praises since the turn of the century when early social networking sites like Friendster and various school reunion sites sprang up. However the big boys, companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and more recently MySpace and Facebook have been naturally disinclined to share their valuable databases with anyone else, least of all smaller, nimbler competitors.

That's slowly starting to change. In the last year all the major players have made grudging concessions to the idea of allowing users to share their own data on other networks. Then, at the beginning of May, MySpace became the first major social networking site to allow user information to be shared outside of its pages. Not to be outdone, Facebook launched their own initiative the next day, and Google followed within the week.

So, a new age of blissful openness has dawned, right? Wrong. Within another 48-hours the first tiff had already sprung up. Facebook announced that they would stop supporting Google's initiative, essentially cutting off the flow of any data between the two. Facebook claims that Google plays too fast and loose with user's privacy, and passes information to advertisers without their knowledge.

Now, while this smacks more of corporate brinkmanship than true concern for users, there is a grain of truth that the data portability cheerleaders would rather you didn't think too hard about. If you give your data to one site, and that site is connected to several other sites, in a vast web of data sharing, what guarantees that somewhere in that web someone isn't misusing data?

Not so fast

In theory this can all be solved by good standards for exchanging data, and by industry self-policing. If a rogue site begins selling user data to Russian spammers, they can quickly be ostracised. If the software is only clever enough, they say, all will be well.

But there are other, more subtle considerations. Are you sure you want to be able to instantly share all the details of your life on a new site? What if your boss stumbles across those pictures of you drunk on tequila, taken the day of your sick leave? Given the right privacy settings you can trust Facebook not to let that one slip, but what about the next bunch of cowboys?

And, yes, that can also be solved by software. "Just give the users a way to choose how information is shared between sites," they cry. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a lot of work to me. I can barely maintain one profile, let alone deciding consciously whether LinkedIn can see my photos but Bebo can't, or Facebook can see my top ten movies but not MySpace. There has to be a simpler solution.

There's no doubt that data portability is the future. People are sick of someone else owning their personal data and, given time, they will eventually migrate from more closed systems to more open ones.

Let's just not try to run before we can walk.

Alistair Fairweather is 24.com's Social Networking Product Manager.

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