I blog therefore I am ( …a nerd). Although, I’m pretty sure none of you out there would actually think that. In fact, I’d imagine that you reading this would picture me as intelligent, tall, dark and handsome. Haha! Or maybe not. Two out four are correct but I’ll leave it up to you to decide which. So! Am I just publicly stroking my ego? Or is there some point to this, you ask?
Well, there is! I posted recently about online spaces, privacy and their implications. In that post I quote a few examples of where online spaces had betrayed the trust of their users and allowed their personal information to be used against them. Betrayal, I suppose, is the wrong word to use in this case because there has never been any protection.
Online spaces are, for the most part, public only allowing for the most basic levels privacy. We have ‘friends’ ‘contacts’ and ‘everybody’ and these usually the only distinctions we have when deciding who we share our personal bits with. But this, I’m sure you will agree, is far from who things work in real life. If we are going to be sharing more of ourselves electronically we need more realistic ways of representing trust and protecting privacy.
First of all we need to come to terms with what exactly privacy is. Chrisopher Allen has made some really insightful comments in his post ‘four kinds of privacy’…
When people speak about privacy, they may actually be talking about very different forms of privacy: defensive privacy, human-rights privacy, personal privacy, and contextual privacy.
Defensive privacy is the first form: it’s about protecting information about myself that makes me vulnerable or makes me feel at risk. This type of information can include things like my social security number, my credit report, or non-financial things such as my medical records or my home address… Most of the current privacy issues on the Internet seem to fall into this category.
Closely intersecting defensive privacy is the category of human-rights privacy. Human-rights privacy differs from defensive privacy in that it is about how governments can abuse information, rather then individuals abusing information.
The third kind of privacy, personal privacy, is more unique to the United States. It is what Supreme Court Justice Brandeis in 1890 called “the right to be left alone”. This form of privacy is often what the more Libertarian-oriented founders of the Internet mean when they talk about privacy. Personal privacy covers things like the “do not call registry”, the various rights to do as we please in our own houses — such as view pornography or play S&M games with our partners — and the general right to not be interrupted or interfered with unnecessarily at home.
Finally, contextual privacy. This category is very difficult to define, and is easily confused with other forms of privacy, but I believe it has more to do with an inappropriate level of intimacy. An example of this is when I discovered that my professional colleagues on Orkut could see that I was in a committed relationship, and in turn I could see that some of them were in open marriages. I don’t think there is very much harm that can come from this information being revealed, however, it was “icky” because it was an inappropriate level of intimacy for a professional context.
The important point made here is that there are varying levels of privacy, and each level is sensitive to context. And who we choose to share this private information with is dependant on our levels of trust. Chrisopher Allen has another great post about this too…
I believe that as we evolve social software to better serve our needs and the needs of the groups that we are involved in, we need to figure out how to apply an understanding of how human groups behave and work.
One useful concept I use I call “Progressive Trust”. The basic idea is to model how trust works in the real world, between real people, rather then solely relying on mathematical or cryptographic trust.
This is how I typically explain progressive trust when I meet someone in-person at a conference:
… As our unspoken agreement to continue discussion evolves, we typically will unconsciously check to see if others are listening, and adapt our conversation thereafter. If the discussion becomes more personal or serious, we will often find ourselves moving to a more private portion of the room. As our discussions become deeper, we may begin to speak of things that hint at a mutual respect for confidentiality.
Also early on we’ll begin to scope out the nature of our time together. Is it only professional, or a potential friendship? Even intimate relationships go through this phase — are we with someone who wants to date? Is is possible that a future date lead to something more?
…
At some point our mutual interests may be so large that we decide not just to collaborate, but to share assets, whether through a partnership, a corporation, or a marriage. Before this is complete there will be more credentials and authentication of those credentials (talk to former employees, engage in credit checks, visit each others’ families, take blood tests), endorsements, and less risky tests of the full contract (signing a term sheet, or a marriage engagement).
This is what we should be aiming for and trying build. What we have now is just absurd by comparison.
Take myspace.com for example. A random stranger, 1 of 50 million, wandering around stumbles across your profile and let’s say you’ve filled it out in detail. Said random stranger now knows how you look, your name, your interests, your favourite films, books and who you hang out with (all 739 of them). Real life random strangers might know how you look but, unless you walk around with a name tag, that’s all they’ll ever know.
What happens if someone actually goes out looking for information on you? Say you were applying for a job and they decided to look into your background. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to enjoy some defensive privacy?
(oh, I seem to have gotten just a jbit side tracked with this post, so I’ll get into the tall, dark and handsome bits next time)
Submit, err... Subscribe to my feed
