Today’s batch of links:
Nelson Minar has a short post explaining Google’s new interest-based ads and the privacy controls available to users associated with them.
Here’s the crux:
I’m usually quick to criticize Google on privacy issues. But not this time. Because along with this juicy new ad product, they’re giving users unprecedented control and visibility into the ads they are shown. We can opt out of tracking entirely. Or we can set our ad preferences, viewing and altering Google’s profile of ourselves. And Google has a detailed and readable page describing how their ad products works with personal user data. All of this privacy protection looks real, a user-focussed product, not just some sham to satisify lawyers.
Bruce Schneier’s essay on the fading future of ephemeral conversation is thought-provoking:
This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations — with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet — are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.
We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we’re being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.
I don’t think this is right. Some people haven’t internalized it, but many have. This is, in part, what I was getting at in my levels of candor post.
There are a huge number of things I would never say about a coworker in email. There’s a large number I wouldn’t say over instant messenger. The same goes for texting and voice mail. Some things are only worth saying on the phone or even face to face. I’ve been online in some fashion for over two decades, and I’m a fairly private person to start with, so I am very careful about not saying things that are going to turn up later.
Indeed, these days posting words, photos, and videos online is sort of like getting tattoos. Think ahead, because they’re going to be around forever whether you want them or not.
What I wonder, though, is whether we’re going to see some kind of crest in terms of how harshly people are punished for their previous online behavior. When there are embarrassing photos of everyone online, then by definition their existence will no longer be sensational.
Stephen O’Grady talks about the risks of using Twitter to publish personal information:
But for the majority of us, I always thought the costs of keeping everything under lock and key far outweighed the benefits. Now, however, I am being forced to reconsider that view. Because, as John Simonds reports (not to rag on John here, he’s just the messenger), one or more of the professional communities I interact and work with may use the tool to form an impression of me.
It’s not obvious to me that this impression would be anything less than professional. I’m generally not Twittering after a night on the town, every other word is not something that would be considered unprintable, and I’m not posting the intimate details of my day to day existence. But I need to consider it, still, because as I’ve discussed in the past, Twitter is a personal tool for me first, professional tool second. A distant second.
I think this is why we’re seeing more people with two Twitter accounts, a public persona and a private one that they share with friends. I haven’t gone that route, however, I will say that my Twitter feed is currently protected.
(This reminds me that I need to write that post I’ve been meaning to about the value I see in Twitter in general.)
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