Privacy and Control in Social Networks
Nov 17th, 2007 by Aswath
Concerns have been raised regarding who owns the content generated and shared by users in public networks like Facebook. For example, Dan York notes in a post from July that for all the desirable qualities of Facebook, the data can freely flow into but can not easily flow out of such networks. Furthermore he observes that users can share only among others in the network. In an earlier post, he had stated that all these modern networks look more and more like old e-mail – they are all walled gardens. He hopes that just as SMTP opened up email across enterprises, some protocol development brings down the current set of walled gardens. Recently, Rich Tehrani also expressed this opinion when he compared the current crop of social networks to AOL of a generation back.
Related to the question of who owns the user generated content is the question of privacy. This question has become critical with the recent announcement from Facebook regarding their ad placing program that they call Beacon. Many people like D. Weinberger, Fred Stutzman and others they reference have expressed their concern on privacy issues. In a more recent post, Dan York references a video from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
We at EnThinnai share these concerns and are betting our sweat and equity that such concerns are valid and are widely held. EnThinnai is architecturally designed so that each user’s data could be isolated with the user deciding on the set of people who can have access to each piece of the data. You can get details on this from the presentation available in the previous post.
One of our business plans call for a hosted service model. Even in that model, the user will have control over the data and the extent of privacy will be determined by the users. We subscribe to the principles of Attention Trust.
If you also share these concerns, please take detailed look at EnThinnai. If you have concern with some of our decisions, please leave a comment. We will address them. But we are confident that you will like what you see; in that case please spread the news. We can use all your encouragement.