jump to navigation

No Public Privacy September 2, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
Tags: , ,
6 comments

My town is fairly techno-savvy.  They run a great web site with up-to-date information on just about anything you can imagine.  They also provide real-time email notification of town issues.  Any time there is an emergency road closing, or an impending storm, you get a nice email letting you know.  You also get all the official town press releases, as they are, um, released to the press.

I always thought this was pretty cool, until last week.  That’s when I got an email from the town informing me that the address lists used to drive the email system are considered a public record and are therefore obtainable under the Freedom Of Information Act.  The town wanted me to know that someone had just obtained a copy from the town, and that I should be on the lookout for potential spam as a result.

Isn’t that great?  Spammers need not scrounge addresses on their own, or pay for them from dubious sources.  Instead, they can get them, for free, from every municipal entity in the country that provides information via email.  Somehow, I don’t think this is what was envisioned when the FOIA was passed.

Now citizens have a choice: continue to receive timely (and potentially life-saving) information from your town, or be subject to even more spam from those who get the lists from your town.  Of course, this punishes the most forward-thinking towns who have taken the time to implement these fancy services.  Backwards towns, still distributing information via criers, are not putting their citizens at risk.

I know that I should be running appropriate spam filters (I do) and not open suspicious messages from destitute ex-royalty in Nigeria (I don’t), but not everyone is as techno-hip as I am.  Even worse, you know the spammers will be sending fake messages that look like missives from my town, just to further confuse the recipients.  I know that is somehow illegal, but I’m guessing that most spammers are not following some sort of Spammers Ethical Code to prevent this kind of stuff.

Lots of people fret that private data being held by third parties may someday be retrievable via subpoena, and much is made of how responsible Google and other large firms will be when trying to protect our data.  But I don’t know that many people have worried about what our local town government will do when asked for our data.  Now we know: they turn it over to comply with the law.

I have to believe that certain town-held data (like utility billing data) is confidential.  Or is it?  Could I send a letter to any town in the United States and get their complete billing database, under FOIA?  Forget email.  That kind of data would be a goldmine for all sorts of data mining and marketing insight.

I don’t know where this is headed, but I am not happy about where it is so far.  We need to rethink how data is held by public agencies, and how it can be withheld except under certain very well-defined circumstances.

Someone Is Listening November 7, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
Tags: , ,
2 comments

My recent posts (here and here) on privacy management in social networking tools have paid off!  Yammer, one of my favorite new tools, has added group-based security.

Yammer is like Twitter, except that it restricts the messaging space to everyone within a single email domain.  It is intended to serve as a protected messaging environment for a single company.  In this regard, it works very well, since you must have an email in the domain (typically company.com) to join a particular group.  We’ve been testing it on a limited basis in my company and it has met with some initial enthusiam.

Unfortunately, Yammer soon breaks down: its single flat user community does not mirror the actual groups that form within a company.  Conversations are inhibited when anyone can listen in.  That is, they were, until Yammer added groups.

Groups make Yammer much more useful.  Messages posted to a group are only seen by that group, but your main stream on Yammer includes all your groups and the public stream, seamlessly integrated.  I immediately created a group just for my management team, and it worked just as I had hoped.  Now we can have private conversations and still exist in the main Yammer space for my company.

All the wrinkles aren’t worked out.  I suspect there will still be the awkward moments when a message intended for a group gets posted to the public timeline.  I also haven’t yet figured out how to post to a group from my phone, although the desktop client is fairly elegant in this regard.

Overall, it is a big step forward for layered group security in social networking tools.  I’m glad that the folks at Yammer are reading my blog and were able to get this up and running so quickly.  Thanks!

Public And Private Lives October 24, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
Tags: , , , ,
add a comment

Last month I talked about maintaining privacy in an open world.  Since then, I’ve got a lot of good feedback from people, all of whom share my concern.

As tools like Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, and LinkedIn become more pervasive and status updates begin to filter between sites, lines are blurring between public, private, business, and personal posts.  Blogs that were once targeted at friends and family are being picked up by business associates.  Tweets intended for friends and classmates find their way to parents and teachers.  Many folks are rethinking what they post on blogs as they consider all the different groups that may read a post.  Even for those who have been long-time proponents of these new open social tools, it is becoming clear that some sort of layering is needed.

A friend of mine recently reported that his boss “de-friended” all of his reports in Facebook.  I can understand this.  Maintaining a professional distance is important, both physically and virtually.  Tweeting that you are calling in sick to take the day off is not a good idea when your boss (or HR) can easily pick up your Twitter feed.

I think there is tremendous value in these tools and am glad that they are increasing in popularity.  Unfortunately, most people are inherently private and will err on the side of communicating less when inappropriate exposure is possible.  It is a shame that, just as broad adoption takes hold, people will stop using the tools for fear of embarrassing themselves.

I don’t have an answer to this.  We’re seeing the first vestige of layered exposure in Plaxo, but Plaxo’s social sharing features are horribly immature.  The best sharing tools, like Twitter and Facebook, don’t provide enough layers to control content distribution.  Something needs to change, and quickly.  As I noted earlier, figure that out, and you’ll be the next social networking billionaire.

Maintaining Privacy In An Open World September 22, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
Tags: , , , , ,
add a comment

My recent posting hiatus was not for lack of desire, but due more to a shortage of time. The ideas are there, swirling in my head, but getting them captured is a bit more difficult. At the moment, I’m on a flight to San Francisco, which is the perfect opportunity to resume writing.

(Rest assured that I have not had to engage in a seat-back war with the traveler ahead of me. Having an exit row seat provides a few inches of room that defuse any potential conflict with those that seek to recline into my personal space.)

As I become more engaged in online communities via Twitter, text messaging, and blogs, it is becoming clear that these tools provide a great but flawed way to simulate the one-to-many and many-to-many conversations that we have in our lives. It is easy to keep up with friends and family, catch otherwise unavailable bits of information, and develop stronger connections with people that matter to us. Unfortunately, these tools do a poor job of emulating the natural walls of privacy and discretion that accompany “real world” communication.

Most of us are fairly selective in deciding what with share with the world. Trivia about our personal lives gets routed to family and close friends. Work stuff goes to coworkers. Less sensitive things may wind up with public visibility, although few of us go out of our way to make sweeping public announcements. These boundaries are natural and intuitive, developed over a lifetime and enacted without much conscious thought.

Few of these boundaries exist in current social networking tools. Where they do exist, they are cumbersome and detract from the interaction experience. Consider a few examples:

  • Twitter has single level of communication.  People see everything you tweet, regardless of who they are.  The Twitter model presumes that listeners will solve the problem, ignoring things that don’t matter. This results in great streams of unimportant information washing over you with occasional nuggets of wisdom thrown in.  You can protect your updates in Twitter, restricting them to only those followers that you explicitly approve, but this is a fairly draconian measure: your tweets are pulled from the public timeline, your “@ replies” are hidden from general view, and you lose a lot of the value that Twitter naturally brings.
  • Plaxo tries to solve this problem with four levels of access: public, work, friends, and family.  This is a good idea, but is crippled by the tedious posting mechanism in Plaxo.  Updating your Pulse in Plaxo (the equivalent of tweeting) requires direct access to the Plaxo web site.  Unlike Twitter, Plaxo has no cool phone or mobile access mechanisms.  Still, the Plaxo idea of access controls is a start at solving the problem.
  • Yammer is a new service that restricts the Twitter experience to the corporate world.  You can create a Yammer environment for members of a single email domain, with all tweets (yams?) restricted to members of that space.  It solves the sensitive public exposure problem that makes many companies leery of Twitter, but immediately shifts it to the microcosm of the workplace: work has as many layers of privacy as the rest of the world.

What we need is a tool that emulates the natural exposure of data that we use every day. I want to develop a community of followers that, for some inexplicable reason, want to hear what I have to say. Within that community, I want to define many layers of access. When I post (or tweet, or whatever) I want a way to quickly and easily indicate the layers that should see that particular posting.

We seem to be in the early stages of building this system. Step one, being able to develop a community of follows, is well in hand. Step two, defining and applying layers of accessibility, is in its infancy and hardly usable. The last step, posting to those layers in a natural and intuitive way, is simply not possible yet.

Step two is easy. There are plenty of existing role-based security models that would be easily adapted to these environments. Let a user define an arbitrary number of layers, provide a way to map those layers to their followers, and you are done. Design some clever drag-and-drop interface with photo icons that appear to sit on a shiny reflective black surface, port it to Android and the iPhone, and you can probably pocket $10 million in venture capital by the end of the week.

The third step fascinates me. It is horribly difficult and a great exercise in elegant user interface design. How do you capture a message, quickly select one or more access levels, and send it out in a quick and intuitive way? Having to scroll and select from a pick list of levels is horribly invasive and breaks your concentration as you post. Are there gestures or some other interaction technique that make level selection easy and obvious? And I mean easy and obvious to anyone, not just the in-crowd that knows that Ajax is more than a cleanser.

Build this tool, and you’ll own the next wave of social interaction platforms. When it’s ready, give me a call so I can be a beta tester!

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.