Alexander van Elsas

The convseration here is being observed by a lot of people on line, because this network is open,open to your friends's friends and open to the search engines. You are right "Social media makes us all public figures", so we need privacy control and we need private message systems. I remember you said before that large scale conversations will reduce to small and closed circles with your several friends. - K.D.

the more open the topics are, the easier it will be "G"ed - kang

KD the scaling down is one thing that will happen, but the ability to set privacy controls by the user himself will be important too. It will need to be granular, and deal with specific situations. The user should be able to switch easily between different privacy levels at any time or within a specific context. - Alexander van Elsas

I've got a post coming later that picks up on something you say here as well as Louis' post and some comments from Ryan Brymer. There's a lot of good thought going on at present. - Colin Walker via fftogo

Colin, a cliffhanger eh ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

I would not temper, set boundaries, or authority on FF! It is great the way it is now! You want privacy go to FB! Do you really get privacy there or your stuff is spread all over the Net behind your back? - Igor The Troll

What about solving the privacy-problem within (existing) social networks? Today in most networks there are not much settings to be made: Either you are in or you are not. In the future it would be good to be able to chose from different layers of privacy which would result in more or less detailed views on profiles and contact possibilities, too. Maybe I should blog about this... - Matthias Schwenk

@Igor, Matthias, NO NO. Privacy is something I want to control as a user. Not FF, not Facebook, not Google. I'm responsible. So I get to decide what happens with my privacy. Facebook or Google aren't there to protect or manage my privacy, they are there to make revenues. let me worry about my privacy, that will work better. Walled Gardens won't be necessary as I control it. - Alexander van Elsas

Alexander just contract a Ninja Assassin Troll and you can sit naked in the middle of the Internet Island! LOL - Igor The Troll

Alex, doesn't Facebook, of all the current socnets, fit the fine grained control the best? You can control to what groups of people (including the public) can see what bits of your profile... It may not let your data out to other services, but in terms of privacy it allows you the most control. Facebook *does* let you worry about your privacy... - felix

Felix, who then is protecting you from Facebook? They help you with your privacy (read " let competitors not have access to your data", but they use it. Privacy can only be your own responsibility. You may want someone else to take care of it with your consent. But that needs to be a trusted party that has only one objective, protect you privacy the way you want it. It can't be a party that takes your data and gives you Beacon for it - Alexander van Elsas

"But unlike in the real world where we are expected to invest time and effort to keep these relationships valuable, there is no such behavior needed online." Once I had kids and job, the work required for most real world friendships went away. The amount required for social media is just right for where I am today. Rejuvenating connections over ideas. And I don't need to share or hear all the various details of our lives. - Hutch Carpenter

Alexander, true, true. :) But at some point your data has to be somewhere and that place is also going to provide functionality to determine prifacy. And if this is going to be widely used, it's most likely going to be controlled by an entity that is going to need to make money. My purpose is not to say that FB is great, far from it, but in terms of privacy it seems to me, they're doing probably the best job of any current big networks. - felix

Felix, I'd pay a trusted party to handle my privacy the way I want it. I'd never let a commercial organisation that isn't there to protect privacy handle that for me - Alexander van Elsas

Hutch you are right. It allows us to have many online connections. I just saw Phil Bauman call his FF friends "idea friends", as the relation is based upon sharing of ideas and conversations (in another fragmented thread ;-) But in real life, we tend to give and expect more in a friend relationship. - Alexander van Elsas