Protecting your privacy when moving data between social networks
OK - so now its time to get down to some serious topics.
So Person A has invested in a huge social network on Social Networking system-A (SNS A). Its her social capital. She owns it, not SNS-A. And now she wants to move her list of friends to SNS-B.
Moving her links, photos, blog posts, etc. is not the issue. That’s easy. She clearly owns all that stuff - lock, stock and barrel. She move it anywhere she wishes - with no ramifications on anybody else. [NOTE: We’ll cerainly want to give her control over exactly what can move - where.]
But when she moves her list of friends (and in a related issue - her Groups) to SNS-B - she needs to bring along the emails of those friends - or else they’re really not ‘there’.
In other words - an auto-registration is desired so that all those friends can ALSO come into SNS-B and have registered accounts. Or so she thought.
But wait! Do all these people WANT to get moved over to SNS-B? This is something we dealt with 3 years ago with the FOAFnet design. We came up with the notion of a opt-in checkbox - which defaults off.
ONLY if someone specifcially opts IN to having their email moved - anywhere - can their email in fact be moved. And that’s the premise I’ve been operating under for movng forward until Chris Messina brought up and even more detailed scenario. Its not just that someone doesn’t want to have their email moved - but how do people know and trust what will happen once that email gets moved?
My answer to Chris was - “well don’t move your email” - but this matter of trust is an underlying issue - which can ONLY be solved when authoritative, 3rd party ‘brokers’ come into play.
That’s what OpenID and Sxip are about.
A V 2.0 of the OpenID spec is floating around that is goign to extend OpenID into new realms. I’m going up to Vancouver this coming week to talk to folks about it. We’ll all be attending the Identity Open Space unconference.
Oh boy - at least I get to get some killer sushi and Alaskan King Crab - again.
But back to being serious (not that food isn’t a serious subject) - I’d like to hear from folks out there how they think this should all work.
On one hand - we want to move our friends with us - on the other - they deserve the right to say - “NO - don’t move me.”
What do you think?
July 16th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Another possibility… create a new, pseudonymous, identity for the friends on the destination website… give them the option of linking that identity to their others. I think the open source community could provide leadership for standards that allow people to prove that they own an on-line identity with minimal information disclosure.
To make this perhaps a little clearer… Joe takes his network to a new place and says that he has 150 friends. For each friend, Joe gets back a token that he can send to his friends… the token will prove to the new site that the person using it really is Joe’s friend. Thus, Joe reveals nothing about his friends and it’s up to Joe to decide if he wants to send the tokens. When a friend receives a token but already has a membership at the new site, the token will simple allow him to “merge” the two identities (”Joe’s friend” and their own) on the new site.
And hey, Marc… long time! Can’t remember when we last saw each other… but I’ve spent the last 10 years working on social networking of one sort or another, mostly focused on analysis of communties.
Nick
July 16th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Maybe a more radicat vision: What if we assume a sort og Meta-SNS. Where people do not NEED to move along with the network to continue to take part in it?
So, Joe has this group on Yahoo!, and wants to move it to PA. The big idea/vision of PA is (as I understand it) that people can be a member of any SNS to participate in a PA group/network/whatever. So Joe’s friends can stay whereever they are now, and still take part in his new network…
Sure, this is (only) a vision, that needs to be expressed in code and processes somehow, but idealy no one needs to be a member of PA to participate in a group/network there, right?
Maybe the fiends-list Joe brings along can be a simple list od pointers. Each friend-entry is a pointer to the profile of that user - whereever that may be. The OpenID idedtifier URLs are pretty much that. An URL pointing to your profilepage at the network that hosts it. Or your own, if you have control.
-Martin
July 17th, 2006 at 9:02 am
Martin, that sounds good. Let’s look at the way we deal with personal information outside the web: White pages, Yellow pages, etc. Lists of names (people, companies, institutions) linking the name to an information structure we know how to use: the address. So we don’t need 100 white pages but one central repository for this information.
September 2nd, 2006 at 3:43 am
OpenID is just an identity system - to make single sign-on easier. It’s not about trust or managing your private infromation. There is an extension, but it’s not primary purpose