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Is Making Public Data "More Public" a Privacy Violation?
- aw3c2 17y agoVery interesting topic! I use random nicknames a lot. For example on Freenode IRC. I then started talking on different channels and also, without hesitation linked to some of my personal websites. Now I find IRC logs searching for my websites and leading from there, that random nickname which of course is not so random anymore then. It is a weird thing. You know its public, but you do not expect it to end up in a search engine. After all it is realtime like a conversation and who would think of recording (and indexing and publishing!) those. Until now I used IRC like the real world. You know there are cameras everywhere but you do not expect to be seen on them.
- frossie 17y agoOnce again, click through to the referenced Danah Boyd's talk if you haven't already: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html It's a perfect dissection of the Google Buzz issue, which encapsulates this whole debate.
- code_duck 17y agoI've encountered this. A project I worked on was a API site that helped members of another site track their account milestones, using info gathered via a public API. Though the information was all public and available without any authentication, some people felt like it was an invasion or privacy and that others would use it to 'spy' on them. We could have actually used more telling and personal info, however, and chose not to - if someone was really interested in gathering data about another member, they could have done a lot better than to use our site. Same principle, anyhow... public data made more accessible was considered a privacy violation. This does make sense, as lowering the access barrier to make other people's data attainable quickly and easily has a significant impact on whether third parties will view it at all.