OpenYou: The Limits of Privacy on the Social Web
What do you think the above image (which I drew) represents? It's YOU -- as a slave of the popular internet culture and as a participant in the massive user-generated social web. Allow me to describe what all these fancy colors and lines represent:
- Blue Dashed Line is your moment-by-moment outer side, what others see, the obviously apparent things in your life;
- Red Cloudy Thing is the sum of your thoughts, ideas, souvenirs and things in your life (not just momentary);
- Black Inner Circle is your most intimate side, your fears, things that you generally choose to hide from other people;
- Green Arrows represent your relationships and communications with other people.
When you add up all of these things, it is you - the public and private you on the Web. What's more, there seems to be a trend happening. I call it OpenYou and it signifies that people are getting more and more open on the internet.
Let's take a look at how today's popular web sites participate in this social puzzle - what are the sum of the elements that constitute the social web, and are they contributing to a more open you?
Blue Dashed Line - Twitter
Twitter is the new kid on the block, created by the people who developed Blogger.com. Twitter is a simple idea - it's a way of broadcasting what you are doing to your network. This is exactly what our blue dashed line represents. The aggregation of what you do gives a great insight about your personality. Also, we often wonder what our friends are up to - it's usually the first thing we ask when we call someone (what are you doing?). Twitter has been a big hit, by satisfying this basic social need.
Red Cloudy Thing - Blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us
With blogs, you share your thoughts and ideas. It's a great form of self-expression. Photos and links give important information about you too. They constitute your memories; where you were, what you were doing, what you were interested in, what you were thinking of. But as you can see, all these questions are asked in the past tense - because the actuality of these are low. And that's the thing that differentiates this from Twitter and the blue dashed line. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad are the main constituents of this space.
Green Arrows - Social Networking
Social networking is actually more about communication than self-expression. Because unlike the previous examples, with social networking the purpose is interaction, finding new friends and showing yourself to others. That's why we define social networking with green arrows - it's our direct communication with the outside world. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook are the best known examples of this.
Black Inner Circle - Nothing!
Do you think you've taken everything online? No, there is one thing left, a black inner circle - the deepest side of you, your most intimate feelings, your fears, your secrets, your obsessions. This part is the thing that you always hide from others, even from your family maybe; that's why it sounds like a bad idea to share this too.
Last December, I tried to explore this idea by myself with a Wikipedia-like open source (with database also) project, OpenHuman. After it got Slashdotted, I got over 1200 members - not so bad. And some of them really went so deep that they put their naked picture online. But after some time, the site lost its activity - and the extreme profiles started to drop too.
Conclusion
The inevitable reality is that we get more and more open each day. The limit? Perhaps the black inner circle, perhaps nothing... Perhaps we will completely give up our privacy - and for example we can get all the information about someone online before meeting them in person. We may have 'Human search engines', which make everyone easily trackable.
There is a saying that information is power. Some may argue that by opening up yourself, you lose some of your power - that your weaknesses become apparent. Personally I believe in not hiding any information, personal or otherwise. What's your position on this?
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There's no way one day "everything me" will be online and accesible by others.
Seen "Liar, liar" or "What women want"? No matter how transparent we think we are, our thoughts are always a lot deeper than what we say, or write. And in a way, I think that's a very good thing. If we all always said/wrote exactly everything we thought, I believe the world would become a mess.
Posted by: RBA | April 10, 2007 2:47 AM
www.grouphug.us could be seen as a step towards that Black inner circle, sadly the spammers have moved it to a moderated set-up, it's a format that needs an anonymous registration process, that way you get the good stuff, its what we don't want to say that's really interesting ;)
Posted by: Harry | April 10, 2007 5:31 AM
>> Personally I believe in not hiding any information, personal or otherwise.
How about putting your bank account details on your blog?
I thin the "Black Inner Circle" may become smaller for some people.. but it will always be there.
Posted by: Tuesday | April 10, 2007 8:45 AM
Emre...Great post...I wrote about this some time back
http://karmaweb.wordpress.com/2006/09/22/privacy-and-social-networks/
Also are you familiar with semi serious, Norlin's maxim -
"The internet inexorably pulls information from the private domain into the public domain."
Check out the original post here
http://blogs.zdnet.com/digitalID/?p=60
Posted by: Jitendra | April 10, 2007 8:52 AM
This is one of the crappiest post I've seen in recent times. Richard you need to come out of your computer screen !!
Posted by: Harshal Vaidya | April 10, 2007 8:58 AM
To the unnamed commenter, of course no one would do that, this is not what black inner circle represents, it's not about such material things that can create a threat for your life.
But it's about your sexual preferences, fobbies, fears, regrets and stuff that you don't like to talk about normally.
@Harshal: thanks for being so harsh - your parents seem to have found a good name for you. ;)
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | April 10, 2007 9:37 AM
I think there's an interesting circle which is the stuff that is in your 'black circle' in real life, but makes it outside when you go online..
Posted by: Simon Waldman | April 10, 2007 9:56 AM
What do I think? Well, I think that we're forgetting that the vast majority of folks don't use any of these social tools. At all. In my circle of friends, no one blogs. No one IMs. Email? yep. Facebook/Myspace/twitter/etc? Nope.
Some of this is generational (I'm in my 40s), but that's a simplistic excuse. Some of this is also because these people are busy with their lives. And, some of it is simply personal preference. They don't WANT to share a lot of personal details publicly.
We take many cues on social media from youth and, while that's interesting, I see little discussion about the ways in which youth behavior is different from adult behavior (exploration of identity, etc). The changes in behavior from youth to young adulthood (20s) to the 30s and beyond is an interesting one... how will it affect social technologies? They won't simply drop them.. but to pretend that they will simply carry them forward, behaving the same way at 35 as they do at 15 is naive. It will bear watching I think.
Posted by: rick gregory | April 10, 2007 10:22 AM
With statements such as "Perhaps we will completely give up our privacy" the post seems to assume that we as individuals have control over the extent of our privacy. I'm not sure that the assumption holds.
Posted by: Andrew | April 10, 2007 10:59 AM
@Andrew, you mean what? Who controls it?
@Rick, I think video games can be a good data for making predictions on this. What's the ratio of people who played video games in their childhood but then gave up against those who keep playing.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | April 10, 2007 11:29 AM
Interesting and thought-provoking post. I've been wondering along similar lines recently (http://nwinton.wordpress.com/2007/04/04/the-light-of-other-days/), albeit with regards to education and the information we share online.
I find the whole moral basis of our society is changing, but the majority of people haven't realised this yet...
Posted by: Neil Winton | April 10, 2007 12:35 PM
@emre - or music... people bu a lot of music in their teens and twenties but that tends to fall off as they move into their thirties and beyond. Oddly, I've never been much of a gamer... but recently got sucked into World of Warcraft. Life's just not linear (sigh).
One thing I'd caution against is extrapolating from what enthusiasts for a particular thing do to how we will all live. Saying a service has 5 million users seems impressive - until we remember that there are hundreds of millions online and billions to follow. Twitter, Jaiku and the like might become very big in numbers... yet remain tiny in adoption percentage. That's fine - not everyone has to love something for it to be useful, interesting and worthwhile
Posted by: rick gregory | April 10, 2007 12:40 PM
There is power in celebrity.
Posted by: Hashim | April 10, 2007 1:01 PM
I think Andrew's point is right on ... to suggest that we even have privacy is a bit disengenous.
I wrote about this some time ago. My thesis is that corporations and the government know more about us and have more information about us than we do as individuals or that people that we care about and consider friends or family have about us. I can't exactly say what the net effect of this is, but, as you suggested in terms of knowledge having power, I think it's the ability to restrict one's access to data about them that becomes powerful... and that's why I'm something of an advocate for personal attention data repositories.
Think about it this way: the more raw information that individuals have about themselves, the greater the need for better tools to help make sense of that data will be. I look at services like Wesabe springing up from a need to understand one's personal banking records, which, to date, are a mess of hieroglyphics and bank codes. For some reason banks don't really work hard at making personal financial trends easy to understand or to inform us in making better decisions... And despite tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money, we're still stuck dealing with proprietary formats that lock up vital information about ourselves that companies have access to but that we don't.
So, this whole notion of privacy that many people get up in arms over is actually a mirage of control -- the only privacy you have is from your neighbors and family and friends. And, in most cases, don't you want them to know you better than the government? Or big companies? And that's why blogging and similar publishing means are really powerful and valuable: they put this information that was once very hard to disseminate into the hands of friends.
Say what you will about who also gets access to that data, but I think having a publicity policy is a lot wiser than a privacy policy; Kathy Sierra did get a lot of support and attention because of how much perceived privacy she's given up... and as such, when some miscreants decided to invade what little space she'd carved out for herself and her family, an army of people took up her defense, much moreso than would have if she's clung to this idea of privacy and anonymity.
Anyway, the choice to be pubic and accessible is a personal one, but it should be made not out of some sense of "being private" but rather, in the sense of proactively sharing information with people that you want to know you better.
Posted by: Chris Messina | April 10, 2007 1:19 PM
@Chris, thanks Chris, now I get the point of Andrew and you. And I agree with you.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | April 10, 2007 2:18 PM
I think Chris' note is great, and Emre's graph is snazzy. I agree completely - the choice to be public is a personal one... and you know "the personal is political".
That cornerstone of feminist theory is also key to internet theory and open source theory I think. When we chose to 'proactively share information with people we want to know better' as Chris puts it so awesomely, we contribute more to the commons and communicate that we want to know others better by putting more of ourselves up for debate. It's generous, and can be beneficial.
Which isn't to say it's easy or comes naturally. I find it hard to live publicly sometimes for fear of saying too much. But I'm getting over it. =) And I think projects like openID and mybloglog extend the potential in our increasing comfort with our public selves in mind blowing ways.
Posted by: Risa Dickens | April 10, 2007 5:43 PM
Black circle, nothing? I think not. One word: fetish. There's heaps of stuff online that's pretty personal relating to people's fetishes and fears.
However, all these online tools you've mentioned are about critical mass. That's what makes them popular and successful.
What you won't get is a critical mass for the black circle. Just lots of lurking in the shadows of online land, the same way it happens in real life.
Posted by: Miss Manda | April 10, 2007 5:46 PM
I blogged about your post here: http://www.downtheavenue.com/2007/04/the_privateyou_.html
where I talk not just about privacy but online versus offline, always on versus sometimes off and AWAY from the public eye.
When you are always on, always out, whether its online or offline, there is no time for re-charging or creation. One of my favorite books: The Power of Full Engagement refers to it as Recovery Time.
In Gelb's How To Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci, he poses the question: where are you when you get your best ideas?
The answer is not inside a news aggregator, Twitter, flickr or a social networking site. The answers are "in the shower," "resting in bed," "walking in nature," and "listening to music." In other words, inside your private self, your privateYOU not your openYOU.
The latter is slipping further and further away and many of us are starting to wonder how far people are prepared to go in the public eye. I also wonder what it is that they really want on the other side.
Renee
Posted by: Renee Blodgett | April 10, 2007 6:29 PM
a finegrained group sharing aspect is important. who do you want to share information with, what kind of social environment makes you more productive? until we do not start to use some kind of social semweb approach, we are stuck with "publish or perish" tweaking robot.txt or posting narcicistic twitter feeds. the ego is not the core of the information flows. tcp/ip is ego-less, as well as the copy-pasted info-particles once they are detached from their authorship. btw, twitter would hardly become successful in europe. it´s a build on top of the lack of popularity of SMS in the USA. the rest is tumbleblogging with a neat api. plazes.com does it better, technically seen. so, we need tools to finetune desired audiences to build up the resonance field in which meaninful communication, micropublishing and collaboration can florish.
Posted by: pit schultz | April 10, 2007 8:53 PM