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nialllarkin-blog-blog · 12 years ago

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People don't care about privacy.

Originally posted Oct 30th, 2009

Discussions about privacy are muddled. That’s because people are often talking at cross purposes.

It turns out that privacy is virtually impossible to define.

And to further confuse matters, we think we care about it. But when it really comes down to it. We don’t.

To begin to make progress in understanding privacy we first have to recognise that we relate to privacy at two distinct levels. At a societal level and at a personal level.

Yet another threat to society At the societel level the concern is about government spooks and megacorporations. Pouring over your data and watching your every move. This is a very real concern. But… It’s impersonal. And filed away in our heads under “Yet another threat to society.” In short people don’t feel it acutely enough to actually alter their day-to-day behaviour. Even though they kinda know they should. So, in a practical sense its just as if people don’t care about privacy.

This time its personal The erosion of privacy at a personal is very different. I hold that privacy cannot be usefully defined at this level, except to be defined by the breach. By instances of social embarassment. By those moments when social spheres collide with messy consequences. Facebook has gone further than most in bringing this reality to light. At its best Facebook is a serendipity engine. At its worst its a privacy trainwreck. To restate that. When we are pleasantly surprised we call it serendipity. When we are unpleasantly surprised we call it a breach of privacy such as when Facebook Reconnect prompts users to reconnect with ex-lovers and dead friends.

'Privacy' is a red herring Its all very subjective and context sensitive and this is why I say that at this level privacy as a notion is not amenable to definition. And it distract and confuses us, making it difficult to see what is really going on. Its better to reframe the situation. And recognise that people don’t care about privacy. What they really care about is social embarassment. They want the happy accidents that are the upside of social collisions without the messy consequences that are the downsides. Of course, this is not possible with Facebook. Its a double-edged sword. You can’t have one without the other.

The Future I suppose someone will eventually find a way give the consumers what they want. The upside without the downside. What will it look like? Who knows, but it will likely be a new platform that does not have these problems baked in.

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nialllarkin-blog-blog · 12 years ago

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Eek. Its so easy to get caught out on Facebook.

Originally posted Jul 9th, 2008

Joe Drumgoole invited me to join him on his regular technology slot on "The Right Hook" last Monday. Good fun. I relayed a couple of tales illustrating some of the pretty unexpected ways innocent use of Facebook could end up biting you in the *ss. These are not isolated incidents. There’s a story in the paper every day. In fact, as if to prove the point Darren from Putplace picked up this story on breaking news right after the show.

A winger with Crystal Palace, shared the fact that he was about to have a trial with Fulham with a select group of his friends via Facebook. Or so he thought. The details of the message could be seen by all 2.7m members of the site who have joined its London section. As a member of the London section himself he unwittingly broke the story to supporters of both clubs and to anyone else in the capital interested in reading candid transfer gossip.

#facebook #privacy #putplace #therighthook #justmigrate

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nialllarkin-blog-blog · 12 years ago

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Owning the future of trust

Originally posted Jun 15th, 2008

All social systems are based on trust. That truism scales from groups of friends to distributed economies. It is trust that lubricates commerce, whether that is the social commerce at an informal social gathering or the market commerce in a stock market. If you position yourself to own the future of trust, you are well placed to put yourself at the heart of all commerce. That’s why this recent patent application interests me. It taps back into the natural form of social trust. That is, the trust rating that is natrually socially assigned within a community as opposed to the trust rating assigned by some institution. And uses that as a more reliable rating of creditworthiness. Sociofinancial systems and methods

Lenders (including peers, financial institutions, merchants, and the like) in the more developed areas the world typically use a credit score as a measure of an individual’s or entity’s creditworthiness. Roughly speaking, a credit score categorizes or assigns a probability to the likelihood that an individual or entity will honor a debt. Credit scores were developed to accommodate merchants and banks that needed to extend credit to individuals and entities that were not personally known to them. Credit scores are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of credit. For centuries if not millennia before the emergence of credit scores, lending decisions were made on the basis of trust relationships and codes of conduct between individuals or groups within communities. In many offline communities, and especially in offline communities that are in less developed areas of the world, this is still the predominant form of lending. Recently, online communities such as Facebook have emerged. A major function of online communities is to capture and encode relationships between people, groups of people, entities, groups of entities, and so on. Based upon these relationships, it is possible for members of the online community to share applications and content with one another. Also, in some cases it is possible for computing applications to access these encoded relationships and use them for some purpose. There exists a need to capture and encode financial trust relationships in online communities, and to enable borrowing, lending, repayment, collections, and related actions based upon such relationships.

#sociofinancial #trust

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nialllarkin-blog-blog · 12 years ago

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Designing social software: Gentry Underwood IDEO

A nice piece on the challenges and opportunities that are part of social software design from Gentry Underwood.

Here’s some excerpts:

The problem: “…for all of the press and fanfare, most social software is, well, socially awkward. ” “…design is profoundly awkward for more nuanced social interaction. ” “…most social software tools are clumsy and ineffective at smoothly facilitating interpersonal interaction.

The opportunity: “…From an historical perspective, we are still in the early days of social interaction design.” “…social software is pretty far from mature” “…there is ample opportunity to produce something truly new.”

Success requires: “…different skills than those employed traditionally in software design.” “…a deep understanding of the unseen elements of relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules in social systems.”

Here’s a link to the original article

And here’s a video of him giving a talk based on that article:

#asymmetricrelationships #autisticsocialsoftware #designsocialtool #socialnetworks #socialsoftware #sociallyinept #winograd #justmigrate

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nialllarkin-blog-blog · 13 years ago

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