Thursday, January 10, 2008

The Minefield of Social Data Sharing

It could be great for users, publishers, and advertisers that Google, Plaxo and Facebook are agreeing to make their data interoperable, as detailed by Techcrunch. Moving addresses and IDs across services is a great idea so that we don't have to manually recreate lists of our friends for multiple environments. We don't want a repeat of the IM wars that has resulted in me using 4 chat clients to reach all of my friends.

Advertisers will be happy because they can learn more about individuals by seeing what they do on multiple sites.

However, protecting consumer privacy will be more complicated as social nets decide what to share and how to prevent it from being hacked. What will be the user controls for sharing friend lists, photos, RSS feeds, favorite sites, etc? Maybe you don't want some of your friends to see your Flickr photos or know that you've emailed that ex-girlfriend. Or, you may not want the world to know what DVDs you rented or what book you bought on Amazon.

Also, if the ID on one site gets compromised, will it provide a pathway to all of your data/friends? In an age of fear of Big Brother, consumers are largely going in the opposite direction, exposing all of the lives to the world. If marketers make the most of that information, consumers shouldn't be surprised.

Hopefully all of the social environments (Flickr, MySpace, and LinkedIn) will join the effort to securely share data so that we can have true interoperability.

By John Gartner at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

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