Web 2.0: Issues

There are some issues with Web 2.0, mostly in the areas of pri­vacy, secur­ity, copy­right — all those things you’d rather you did­n’t need to worry about. Take pri­vacy for example. On many social net­work­ing sites people sign up and then put in all their per­son­al inform­a­tion simply because there’s a field there for it. Often those pro­files are pub­lic by default, rather than private, and often they’re open to search engines as well. So people think their inform­a­tion is private and then dis­cov­er it isn’t, and have to go search­ing through menus to find out how to turn on those pri­vacy fil­ters that are turned off by default. In many cases what’s good for the site own­ers isn’t neces­sar­ily good for the users. One big factor in Flick­r’s early suc­cess was the fact that uploaded pho­tos could be seen by the world unless spe­cific­ally made private, and lots of users did (and still do) get con­fused by copy­right issues (cre­at­ive com­mons licenses don’t solve the issue of what “pub­lic domain” etc actu­ally mean).

Then there’s the per­sona issue. I might have a leg­al but slightly embar­rass­ing hobby that I don’t want work know­ing about. So I need to set up a sep­ar­ate online iden­tity for that — people need to think about the implic­a­tions of this in advance if they don’t want cor­rel­a­tions of that hobby per­sona with their “real” one on the basis of an address or phone num­ber or email.

Oth­er prob­lems with the pleth­ora of new Web 2.0 social net­work­ing sites: they often don’t under­stand what pri­vacy and user con­sent mean. You sign up for some­thing, they ask you to upload your address book to see wheth­er oth­er friends are already there, the next thing you know they’ve done spam-a-friend and emailed every­one in your address book without your know­ledge, let alone your con­sent. Or they ask you to give them your user­name and pass­word to some oth­er social net­work­ing site under the “trust us, we will do no evil” motto (whatever happened to “trust but verify”?).

There are some solu­tions to this: users have to be care­ful about the inform­a­tion they hand out (fake birth­d­ates, any­one?) and start demand­ing that sites take care of their inform­a­tion. If I want to hand out inform­a­tion to the world, that’s my decision, but it should­n’t be up to some web site to make that decision for me.

The last of a series on Web 2.0, taken from my talk at the CSW Sum­mer School in July 2007. Here’s the series introduction.