Soapbox time again.... So the topic of privacy and safety of an online identity was discussed in my Web 2.0 class. The discussion leaned on the FaceBook epidemic....I mean addiction.... ok, ok usage. I have to say that when you sign up to use a service such as CrackBook, it can be really surprising what they put in the fine print. An article I found on CIO.com "Managing Privacy in a Web 2.0 World" (http://www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;1453094165) discusses how FB and other "social networks can give away your info and there is nothing you can do or say to stop it".
An interesting case of this happened to "In Facebook's Beacon controversy, some advertisers were able to track the purchases of Facebook users on their site (generally when the individual was logged in to their profile simultaneously). If, for instance, a man was buying his fiancée a wedding ring on one of the Beacon advertisers' sites, the purchase might be broadcast to his bride-to-be's newsfeed before he had a chance to pop the question."
The main point of the article is to show how a group of 14 European partners are getting together at a conference in Zurich about a project called "Prime Life". According to an press release (http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/08/primelife.html) Prime life is an IBM led initiative which "is a new three-year research project, funded by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme with 10 million euros. Coordinated by IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Zurich Research Laboratory and involving 14 other partners, its objective is to empower users to manage and control, throughout their entire lifetimes, their personal data and privacy whenever they participate in Web 2.0 technologies, such as social networks or virtual communities".
The whole idea of creating a tool suite that will help protect my private information from involuntarily being proliferated all over the web by these so called "social networking" site (whose prime purpose is to make us all addicts for their free services while they prey on our uninformed neighbors spreading their info to marketing agencies whose sole purpose is to inundate my email, mailbox, cell phone, and front door knocker with useless advertisement info about their products which I will never buy...whew all that in one breath...) sounds like a hell of an idea to me. Yes I may be just a bit bitter towards these sites.....not much. And I'll admit I have an account on two SN sites, but I refuse to become addicted!!!!
Anyway that is my rant for the week Check out the CIO.com article, IBM may be on to something.
Later
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It will be interesting to see what the research reveals. In order to manage the little bits of information each person has on each site, the overarching software platform will need to be compatible with each of these site's data formats. Sites could then either "buy in" to the platform and tout their compliance, or develop their own propriety format just to avoid the capabilities of the software.
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