Marc Canter – Broadband Mechanics: Protecting your privacy when moving data between social networks:
OK – so now its time to get down to some serious topics.
So Person A has invested in a huge social network on Social Networking system-A (SNS A). Its her social capital. She owns it, not SNS-A. And now she wants to move her list of friends to SNS-B.
Moving her links, photos, blog posts, etc. is not the issue. That’s easy. She clearly owns all that stuff – lock, stock and barrel. She move it anywhere she wishes – with no ramifications on anybody else. [NOTE: We’ll cerainly want to give her control over exactly what can move - where.]
But when she moves her list of friends (and in a related issue – her Groups) to SNS-B – she needs to bring along the emails of those friends – or else they’re really not ‘there’.
In other words – an auto-registration is desired so that all those friends can ALSO come into SNS-B and have registered accounts. Or so she thought.
But wait! Do all these people WANT to get moved over to SNS-B? This is something we dealt with 3 years ago with the FOAFnet design. We came up with the notion of a opt-in checkbox – which defaults off.
ONLY if someone specifcially opts IN to having their email moved – anywhere – can their email in fact be moved. And that’s the premise I’ve been operating under for movng forward until Chris Messina brought up and even more detailed scenario. Its not just that someone doesn’t want to have their email moved – but how do people know and trust what will happen once that email gets moved?
My answer to Chris was – “well don’t move your email” – but this matter of trust is an underlying issue – which can ONLY be solved when authoritative, 3rd party ‘brokers’ come into play.
That’s what OpenID and Sxip are about.
A V 2.0 of the OpenID spec is floating around that is goign to extend OpenID into new realms. I’m going up to Vancouver this coming week to talk to folks about it. We’ll all be attending the Identity Open Space unconference.
Oh boy – at least I get to get some killer sushi and Alaskan King Crab – again.
But back to being serious (not that food isn’t a serious subject) – I’d like to hear from folks out there how they think this should all work.
On one hand – we want to move our friends with us – on the other – they deserve the right to say – “NO – don’t move me.”
