Privacy

To kick off their new ‘Data Availability’ initiative, MySpace is joining forces with a few web giants - namely Yahoo!, Twitter, eBay, and Photobucket, in an effort to give Myspace members the ability to share their profile info across the web. As Brand Strategy reports:

The system claims that this helps “open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and web identity.” It claims that this is the first time that a social website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.

Unlike the Facebook system Beacon, which tells people’s online ‘friends’ what they are buying/doing online if users choose to leave it active, MySpace claims that this initiative puts the user in charge of their own data: “Users will have control over what information they share and who they share it with.”

Myspace users can choose to share their photos, videos, network of friends, and any other publicly available profile info. While Brand Strategy wonder if this is “an attempt to make life easier for consumers or a way for corporates to gather ever more data on their users”, we’re pretty sure more than a few Myspacers will like being able to streamline the management of their public internet persona - something that most active Myspace users devote a lot of energy to.

Brand Strategy Blog: MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter get into data sharing; the future of online profiles?

Wired points us to a Gawker-Stalker type site called Seattle Notables that’s based in Seattle. Where the former maps the spottings of famous people by regular New Yorkers, the latter maps spottings of not-so-regular people by regular Seattle residents. It’s not exactly a frequently updated site but it’s a reminder about this theme of personal celebrity.

“We don’t have many celebrities here,” says McLeod, co-owner of Seattle’s McLeod Residence art gallery.

The site follows characters like Slats, the Duct Tape Guy and The Button Wearing Bus Expert. And ok, they do also follow Seattle’s solo celeb, Bill Gates. The site says:

We are celebrating the notables of Seattle – the people that fill our local stories with heroes, scapegoats, nemeses, and friends. This is an experiment put on by McLeod Residence.

Seattle Notables

The Next Great Thing have the results of their global youth survey on social media and (while they don’t give us an idea of sample size in order to judge the validity of their findings) there are some interesting points about privacy and identity.

According to their results, 44% of respondents say that their online identity is different than it is in real life. This might be connected to the statistic that 55% of the 14-17 year olds surveyed think that their blog and/or profile should be visible to everyone on the internet, compared to just 30% of 25-29 year olds.

Global Youth Survey: Social Media

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Although the price of the GPS Mail Logger may deter the vast majority of potential users (it’s $700), the idea of it is an interesting pointer towards personal control of our offline world using ‘online’ technology. Simply add the Logger in your mail and track your mail with Google Earth!

GPS Mail Logger

A new feature has made its public debut on Facebook in recent weeks - Lexicon - a tool for following language trends across profile, group, and event wall postings.

The Lexicon is a neat feature that maps the frequency of word usage per day on Facebook walls. For example, you can enter “work, tired” into the query box to compare the number of times each of these words have appeared on the walls of every Facebooker over time (searchers can adjust time range). Lexicon accepts up to five terms, and each term can be a word or two-word phrase made up of letters and numbers (however, if the search term appears too infrequently, it won’t appear on the graph).

Above is David Cho’s especially telling Lexicon graph, charting the frequency of use of “break,” “drunk,” and “vacation” from September ‘07 to April ‘08. His analysis:

..The blue line is for ‘break’ peaking at Thanksgiving, Christmas and around March when spring breaks happen, and in comparison to the word ‘vacation’ (the yellow line) that no one ever really uses when you’re that age [of most Facebook users]— I figure if you could segment this by just people who were alumni or unaffiliated with a school the disparity wouldn’t be as high. The green line is ‘drunk’ which peaks every weekend, the highest point being New Year’s Eve.

Facebook Lexicon

Last week, PSFK was given a superb tour of the Wired magazine office by the Editor-In-Chief Mr Chris Anderson (thanks!) This poster of the second edition of the magazine in May 1993 on display in the kitchen/dining area reminded us that privacy issues have been on the agenda for a long while now.

Wired

In need of some new photos of yourself and tired of posed studio shots and awkward self portraits? Want to try something really different? Brooklyn photographer Izaz Rony is offering to be your own personal stalker. After giving details of your daily schedule, Izaz will secretly follow you around and capture candid moments of your daily life. You can even specify what emotions you want him to capture.

[via kottke]

Danah Boyd offers some insightful commentary in reaction to an article in Sunday’s NY Times discussing the digital divide between tech-savvy teens and the adults that try to understand them. The article talks about the miscommunications and frustrations that result from the generational/technological gap, as well as the emergence of a “new sensibility” that comes from instant and constant communication via text and mobile phone calls. Teens’ desire for privacy, secrecy, and socializing, the story points out, are aided by unlimited SMS packages, calls, and uninterrupted connection to their peers via the web (and particularly, social networking sites).

In her response, Boyd acknowledges the way mobile technology has changed the way teens interact and establish boundaries between themselves and their guardians, but also offers a deeper look at the technology-as-cultural-agitator perspective:

…The mobile phone changes the rules. Texting allows people to communicate even when they aren’t at arms length or can’t arrange simultaneous interactions. Because texting happens silently, it’s far more effective as a backchannel mechanism than whispering. Codes are not necessarily about hiding from adults as much as efficiency; deleting sent/received messages is far more effective than codes…

There’s an arms race going on: parental surveillance vs. technology to assert privacy. We aren’t seeing the radical OMG technology ruins everything stage. We’re seeing the next in line of a long progression. And it’s just the beginning. The arms race is heating up. As parents implement keyboard tracking, kids go to texting. How long until parents demand that companies send them transcripts of everything?… The very nature of publicity and privacy are getting disrupted. As kids work to be invisible to people who hold direct power over them (parents, teachers, etc.), they happily expose themselves to audiences of peers. And they expose themselves to corporations. They know that the company can see everything they send through their servers/service, but who cares? Until these companies show clear allegiance with their parents, they’re happy to assume that the companies are on their side and can do them no harm.

Generation gap and technology ruining everything stories will be forever more. These do sell and they are fun to read. Yet, for parents and teachers and other concerned folks wanting to get a clear perspective of what’s going on, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, the intentions and desires aren’t changing… it’s just the architecture that makes the practices possible that is. The refraction of light is changing because the medium through which it is channeled is changing, but the light itself stays the same and to guide our children, we need to remember to pay attention to the light, not the refraction or the medium that’s causing the refraction.

Apophenia: How Youth Find Privacy in Interstitial Spaces

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on how people are cut and pasting other people’s profiles for their social network and dating sites so they look more interesting. They report that a search on MySpace brought up more than 700 recent comments that accuse others of stealing headlines, user names, songs, background designs and entire profiles. Another survey on dating site Engage.com says that 9% of respondents have copied from another person’s profile. WSJ says:

Original souls who discover they have been replicated say it’s unethical and creepy. “I came across a guy who completely STOLE my profile message,” posts one woman in Michigan. “I mean he had to have copied and pasted the whole thing and then just changed gender specific things to fit his own!!”

The Cut-and-Paste Personality - WSJ.com