Privacy

I don't think anyone completely understands the consequences of Web 2.0 technology on privacy and how this may negatively effect people's lives. As a person over 30, I was completely fascinated with an article I read from New York Magazine, Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll , about younger people using Web 2.0 technologies and their attitudes about privacy. It's such a cultural shift in attitudes, but I also wonder if it isn't a little naive.

What I'm curious about is how combining sources of data from the internet may affect your privacy in ways you may not be aware of. Here are some sites and articles I have found as examples.

Where is Your Username registered is a site I found on the popular bookmarks lists on delicious. It allows you to search for usernames on popular Web 2.0 sites like Myspace and Flickr with links to people's userpages. Before I took this class I wasn't really aware that so many of people's userpages were actually viewable by anyone on the internet. I never really thought about it or just mistakenly thought that you had to have an account with one of these sites to view other people's pages. Since people often use the same username for multiple sites it is easy to collect multiple sources of information on one user. You can view what a user has bookmarked on delicious, what music they listen to on Pandora, and what they are selling on Ebay, for instance.

Facial recognition slipped into Google image search is an article about how you can search Google images but just limit the results to faces. There is currently not an option to select this while searching Google. What you do is add "&imgtype=face" to the end of the search URL and it will restrict your image search to just faces. Here is the Google image search for the University of Alaska Southeast limited to just faces.

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives With Amazon Wishlists demonstrates how to find names and addresses of people who read "subversive" books using Amazon Wishlists and then find a satellite image of their house using Google Maps. It makes you wonder why the government would even need to get records from a library of books a person has checked out if this information is easily attainable over the internet.

I tend to be more private on the internet and not intentionally give out a lot of personal information. When I registered at Diigo, I was asked for a lot of personal information such as my gender, city and state, and industry I worked in. At first I didn't realize it was optional and I put it in. When you create a user profile it also gives you information on who has visited your profile. As soon as I registered my profile I started being visited by a user "Anonymous". This person did not have a photo and all of his/her bookmarks were private. Because I didn't know anything about this person and why they were visiting my profile and bookmarks I thought it was kind of weird. This person has visited my profile on many occasions since. I have since deleted most of the optional personal information on my Diigo account. I think I may also consider using different usernames for different Web 2.0 applications I use in the future.

As for children I think it should be more up to the parents to decide what kind of internet controls they should use to protect the privacy of their children. I'm not comfortable with the idea of using filters or blocking certain sites in a public setting like a library. I think these controls would be to restrictive to adult patrons. I also think that young children should not be unaccompanied in a public libraries for safety reasons.