(2012-03-12) Privacy And Federation Links Today

Bringing together, at least temporarily, a number of semi-related links that would normally be in their own nodes, around Privacy and the Open Social Networking Model.

Alexis Madgrial quotes Margot Kaminski wondering whether some breadth of Sharing (Social Networking) would reduce our legal expectation of Privacy. (Kaminski isn't saying that such legal thinking makes sense, but rather that it smells like the future if the Supreme Court keeps thinking like Samuel Alito (or Eric Holder).)

• implications of 2012-02-07-PathcomScrapingUserAddressBookWithoutPermission?

Schools and potential employers are requiring people to provide access to their Social Networking data. Goemann said that prisons are trying to avoid hiring guards with potential gang ties — the agency told the ACLU it had reviewed 2,689 applicants via social media, and denied employment to seven because of items found on their pages.

AdrianneJeffries on Consumer Bank/Credit Card use of the Social Graph. Movenbank requires users to connect their Facebook accounts upon registering, data from which will be baked into a proprietary “CRED” score, a number that determines which rates and products are available. The exact recipe is still being written, but eventually Movenbank will boost your CRED as you hook it up to your accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and even eBay, which calculates a reputation score based on buyer feedback. It’s not the only metric, Mr. King said, but a strong Twitter presence could tip the scale in favor of a marginally risky borrower... If banks learn how to use social media, they could gather information they aren’t allowed to ask for on a credit application—including race, marital status and receipt of public assistance—or worse, to redline segments of the Social Graph.

• perhaps Bad Credit is contagious like Obesity? 2009-09-15-SocialObesity
• Eben Moglen blamed Jeffries (and all FaceBook and Twitter users) for being part of the problem. You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people... Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didn't acknowledge, that every single Photo Graph uploaded to Facebook is put through Facial Recognition software they call Photo D N A which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking. You understand? So every time you upload a photograph to Facebook or put one on Twitter for that matter you are now ratting out anybody in that frame to any Police agency in the world that’s looking for them. Some police agencies in the world are Evil... The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations. The commercial spying operations are used to empower people who have lots to get more from people who have less. They lead to a more unequal society. More unequal in economic terms and more unequal in political terms. The users, as with most stuff that’s dangerous that’s sold to people, the users are the victims and even the stuff you write which purports to be critical will do everything except telling people the central fact, which is they have to stop using.

Vic Gundotra just said that Google Plus won't be getting a writable (nor even readable like RSS!) API any time soon.

Evan Prodromou (of Status Net) shares a Hack Pad document with folks to solicit ideas for his "DecentralizedSocialWeb" session at SXSW.

Paul Booker wonders how Mozilla should get involved.

Some of the Next Edge group are discussing the relevance of Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki.

• Mar22 update: Phil Jones is moving all his Wiki projects to it.

TristanLouis thinks that all Walled Garden-s are bad, even PayWall-s. So Search Engine-s shouldn't index them, and the rest of us shouldn't link to them.

• should Search Engine-s not index Book Store-s or other E Commerce sites?
• one commenter notices that Tristan hasn't dumped those Like Button-s from his blog.
• Andrew Boer defends paid content (well, he narrows his scope to IPad-app delivery), but bashes the scraper/reader apps like FlipBoard. I agree with him on both counts.
  • Well, I'm less sure about the original-content-app-model than the paid content itself. The app is mainly a temporary market hack because it's been easier to get people to pay for content that way, than to just pay via a website.
  • And Tristan's main concern is locking in incumbents, so I'd suggest that, considering the crummy economics of Advertising, having millions of small paid-content players is a good thing.

So I asked in a couple threads: what's the real goal of this effort?

(And maybe it's time to re-read Little Brother.)

Mar21 update: Albert Wenger says I really need to read Jeff Jarvis's PublicParts.