So, after a bit of a hiatus from blogging, I'm back. Today, I'm at South By Soutwest (SXSW) and attended a program this morning on Social Design Strategies. Panelist Daniel Burka (of Digg & Pownce) had some useful thoughts on how to approach privacy as a developer of social networks. These are my notes.
Daniel's first slide provided a nice continuum between places where privacy and expectations are relatively clear (at the extremes) and where privacy is blurry. His examples:
The "most private" realm is Basecamp.
Then comes: Pownce, Vox, Vimeo
The midpoint (where there is possibly the least clarity about what’s private) is: Facebook
Then comes: Flickr, Digg,
And at the "most public" end of the spectrum": Get satisfaction & Metafilter
Daniel summarized Hot Points for privacy issues:
(1) online identity – which parts of identity do the people care about? image? name? (e.g., on digg a user can call herself whatever she wants; on pownce the site will only show first name and last initial, which is limiting on some aspects of social networking)
(2) people’s social networks themselves For example, looking through someone’s entire social network and see who they are “friends” with to some people is a big deal. On pownce, you can make it so nobody sees your friend relationships, but the default is not this.
(3) your communications For example, on digg, the “shouts” feature is to make clear that a "shout" is being public to everyone
(4) tracking people’s site activity (at the main site, or at third party sites). Example, on digg you can see the information for each person who dugg a particular story. This has been a hot button for Facebook for the Beacon product. That product created backlash because it took activity on a completely different site (e.g., fandango) and sent it to facebook. This crossed a certain boundary that hadn’t been crossed before.
Seeling added that this relates to the use of information for statistics -- Facebook & Fandango took information (the fact of buying a ticket to a movie) away from you and turned it into a statistical act.
(5) Control – making things a “preference” to permit control (but this is something to be extremely cautious of). For example, firefox rose over sea monkey because firefox didn’t give you hundreds of preferences (whereas sea monkey let you customize the hell out of it). At digg, perhaps too many options today.
Finally, Daniel stressed that transparency is incredibly important: Be really clear about what posts/etc. are going to be sent to the public, and which posts are going to go just to those people you send them to (in network, friends, beyond friends). Show your committment to transparency by telling people what’s going to happen when the make a post, at the point where they make the post (as opposed to buried somewhere else on the site).
Daniel's Sum Up:
Clarity is at the public/private poles, otherwise prepare
Be nuanced, be sensitive
Give control, but not as a crutch
Transparency, transparency, transparency