Category — privacy

As I wrote yesterday, Google’s integration of Buzz with Gmail is both a pro and con of the service. I wrote, “the assumption is wrong that the people you email with are the same people you want to relate with on a social media site.”

Silicon Alley insider fleshes out this issue in a bit more detail, and I couldn’t agree more:

When you first go into Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow. A Google spokesperson tells us these people are chosen based on whom the users emails and chats with most using Gmail…The problem is that — by default — the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile. In other words, before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see who are the people you email and chat with most…

In my profession — where anonymous sourcing is a crucial tool — the implications of this flaw are terrifying.

Read WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw.

The web was all atwitter (pun intended, and regretted) yesterday after Google announced their Buzz platform, which integrates geo-located status updates and link / media sharing into Gmail. I’ve played around with it a little bit, and thought I’d add my little voice to the echo chamber with a list of pros and cons. Interestingly, a lot of the pros are also cons, as you’ll see below:

Pros

• Integrated into Gmail – Unlike Wave, you automatically start following the people you “email and chat with the most.” Additionally, comments to your buzzes show up right in your Gmail inbox.
• Granular privacy settings -  Not only can you choose to share your “buzzes” publicly or privately, but if choosing to share privately you can even specify which group/s to share with, given the ones set up in your contacts; this is hugely important for the next feature:
• Geotagged buzzes – with the mobile app, you can “snap” a buzz to a location, which sort of places it somewhere between Twitter’s geotagged tweets and Foursquare’s check-in model; you can also view nearby buzzes as well as a “buzzes” map layer in Google maps; and snapped buzzes will also appear on a “Place Page” for that location, if it exists.
• Rich media – shared photos appear as slideshows
• Integration with other sites like Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr and Picasa
• Realtime updates – don’t have to hit refresh in the browser to see new buzzes come in
• Comments & Likes – this is something sorely needed in Twitter and is one of the only areas in which Facebook’s status update implementation beats Twitter’s

Cons

• Gmail integration – I actually don’t use Gmail. I have a Gmail address but it just forwards to another email address I have hosted on my own server. I may use buzz via the mobile app, but I don’t have much reason to go to Gmail and use it, and I suspect neither do the millions of other people not on Gmail. Also, just because I email with someone doesn’t mean I want to follow their buzzes, or have them follow mine. I think the assumption is wrong that the people you email with are the same people you want to relate with on a social media site.
• Yet another social network – Microsoft’s quick response to Buzz’s launch was one of defensive antagonism, but they actually made a good point: “Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation.”Granted it seems like you can pull your Twitter feed and other feeds into Buzz, but until you can post your buzzes to Twitter, Facebook, etc., I think people will be slow to adopt yet another tool like this.
• Too Little Too Late – with Twitter and Facebook so thoroughly entrenched, is Buzz compelling enough to pull users away from those services? I don’t think so, not in its current state. To be sure there are numerous examples of meteoric rises and falls with social networks (Friendster, anyone?), and who’s to say that won’t happen with Twitter or Facebook, but I think in order for people to switch at this point, the new service, whatever it is, will have to be a revolution rather than an evolution.

So there you have it. I guess I’m being one of those infamous fence-sitters, but how could there not be two sides to the story for any new piece of technology?

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The privacy implications that arise out of the recent explosion of location-based services will prove to be one of the most important topics of the coming year (and beyond). Andrew Hyde, in a recent blog post titled, “Committing Location Based Service Suicide,” writes about why he quickly went from location zealot to frustrated recluse:

One specific interaction really bothered me to look at the benefits of these services. I had someone look up historical data on my checkins and put themselves in places so they would ‘run into me.’ Once I switched my habits, they did as well (that is when I figured it out). Their response: ‘well, you put it out there.’ I did.  I opted in to getting stalked.

As I’ve intimated at before, in order for location-based services to succeed they must do two things:

• Give users an easy way to manage their privacy settings and to restrict the visibility of their location to certain subsets of friends
• Make the service so valuable that it’s worth it to the users to reveal their locations

I had mentioned that the Foursquare model is pretty good because you only broadcast your location to your friends on the service (opt-in). But as Andrew rightly notes, “Foursquare…lists the picture and location of recently crowned mayors on their homepage.” This is akin to what Facebook does when they publicly expose parts of your profile. The problem with this “feature” on Foursquare is, as Andrew says, “Here is a picture of someone, with the address of the place they usually hang out. I find that troubling, especially for someone just wanting to share with friends.”

He also notes that it’s simply just not worth it. It’s not worth risking your privacy in return for getting a badge or becoming the “mayor” of your favorite bar. Nor is it worth a little coupon that place might send you. A location-based service has to have some other value proposition (other than just the novelty of bragging about where you are), so that users will accept the dip in privacy for whatever they receive in return.

I think we have yet to see a service that incorporates these two concepts successfully.

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Do I want the whole world to know where I am at any given moment? Probably not, and yet that is the only option I’m given with the new Twitter geolocation implementation. Unless my Twitter feed is protected (which sort of defeats its purpose), tweeting my location will let the entire world know where I am at any given moment, and where I’ve been in the past.

Google Latitude is a little better, in that you have to “opt in” to share your location only with friends you trust, but the moment you open the latitude application, your location is constantly updating. I think these services are going about it the wrong way. And some (or maybe a lot of) people feel that they’re just plain creepy.

Sure, we live in a culture that is increasingly nonchalant about posting their intimate information for the world to see. Facebook, which was traditionally one of the more privacy-focused social networks, recently announced changes that would open more of its users’ data to the internet at large. And Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, recently said that social norms are changing, and, essentially, the age of privacy is over.

But sharing photos and status updates on Facebook is very different from sharing your location with the world. Last night I tested out Twitter’s geolocation using TweetDeck‘s new geotagging feature. I quickly realized that my tweet showed the exact location of my apartment, something I’m not exactly ready to share with the entire internet. I deleted the tweet right away.

So what’s the way forward? Foursquare‘s model is pretty good, in that you have to check-in to a place (opt-in) in order to broadcast your location. And by default you broadcast it only to those people you’ve friended on the service. It’s up to you, then, not to friend too many people as you might do on Facebook or Twitter. Unfortunately it also gives you the option to blast out your check-in on Twitter, which puts us back to square one. On the other hand, most people use Foursquare to let their friends know what restaurant or bar they’re currently at, which is certainly less risky than broadcasting where you live.

But I think there are some ways we can improve things. For one, these services should allow you to narrow your broadcasts to only certain groups of followers / friends. Let me tag my friends as “inner circle,” “good friends,” and “acquaintances.” Then let me choose to whom to broadcast my location every time I do a check-in. That way I have a bit more granular control of my privacy then simply “on” or “off.”

It’s also possible that location-based services may end up only being used for certain kinds of things–things where I’m not as worried about giving my location out to others. This post on Broadstuff points to three types of services that are likely to work in this regard:

Vendors who disclose their locations to all and sundry, and allow anonymised checking by users against their own locations (like websites do now). Having to give away identity will create a barrier.

Person/s to Person/s services that are “equal” in status and can be turned on and off at will (or at least the person can go off-radar)

Open Disclosure…for limited functions (not particulalrly personal) and periods of time, where the benefits of collaborating with others outweigh the benefits of disclosure

What do you think? Is the age of privacy really over? Or is there a dividing line here between services where privacy isn’t much of an issue (Facebook) and those where it is (Foursquare)?

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