melanie mcbride online

In January 2004 I read a post at Loic Le Meur’s old blog that changed my approach to online life and activity. He warned us to “build and check your virtual identity and online reputation or you will be in trouble.” This post inspired me to establish a more strategic online identity and maintain some consistency in my selected metadata (stated background, interests, visual media) and contact networks. Given recent worst practices in new social networking services, Le Meur’s advice couldn’t be more prophetic.

Facebook’s recent - and obnoxious move - to allow open searching of FB profiles outside of FB should be read as a warning sign of things to come. This, only one week after they permitted a tool called Friend Finder to bypass user settings to allow people to spam you add you as a friend - even if you had specified that access to your profile was “message” or “poke” only. This is what happened to me and others. And if that wasn’t enough, my privacy settings were compromised within hours of the automated public search. Somehow, my privacy setting changed from “friends only” search to “all my friends and all my networks.”

Social software researcher danah boyd has written a great post about all of the above with additional tips for dealing with the increasingly sneaky, user-contemptuous changes to Facebook and (we can assume) other yasns:

“When people bitch about MySpace and Facebook being walled gardens, one of the positive things that I offer in return is, “at least those teens’ profiles aren’t in Google’s cache.” With Facebook’s opt-out decision, this is no longer the case. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a bit terrified of what this might mean long-term”

As for the “long term” I’m hoping that this demonstrated contempt for users might serve as a call for more ethical and progressive social networking sites and communities that truly value users, granularity and open source philosophies. Unfortunately, the promotion of bad models (right now) may facilitate a new paradigm where citizens have to pay for the “privilege” of privacy in a free-market for personal data. Until then, we have to let developers know - loudly and clearly - what we will and will not accept. Especially those of you with the power and influence to advocate for more truly “social” social software.

For the future, we must all possess a new literacy in our use of social and participatory metadata. Add this to a critical understanding of privacy and power and we discover another emerging facet of the digital divide.