[Social-discuss] Letting go of your data

[Sandra Snan]

Hi! I just joined the mailing list and I wanted to start out with this
quote from the archives, it was sent by Melvin Carvalho.

“Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about
letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data
which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected
to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from
other applications.

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.¡

Strongly disagree.

The appearance that the major proprietary social sites give is that
you only have to trust people who’re either admins of the site, or
people who use a specific handle or nick—i.e. claim to be someone. You
can set “only people that I’ve explicitly added to my friends list can
look at these photos”, for example. (You’d have to trust that they
wouldn’t copy them any further, or if they did, you’d have a list of
names it could be.)

In my opinion that’s a huge advantage. A lot of my friends have worked
with women’s shelters, and I’ve personally, and many of my friends have,
had problems with “stalker” types.

If this advantage is something that daisychain users will have to give
up for technical reasons, so be it[1], but there’s no gain in
pretending that this isn’t something that a lot of people see as a big
plus with that kind of systems, or that they haven’t “realized how the
web works”. Let’s look this point in the eye, and either implement it
somehow[2] or cede it with regret.

I do agree that it’s somewhat exciting to live in such a connected age
that we do and that humans will change and privacy will erode, but I
don’t have to *like* it and I certainly can try to encourage other
solutions than just plugging into a big, world-readable Borg.

RMS once said, regarding secrets, in a speech (paraphrasing): “Soap
opera secrets, like if you have a crush on someone, I can keep, but
not knowledge that can advance human technology, like printer drivers”
or something to that extent. Well, social networks is all about the
“soap opera” life!

Sandra

[1]: Even though that would put us not really much further from just
setting up a blog, some rss/atom feeds and a foaf blogroll. (Maybe
we’ll have event/calendar stuff, though. It bugs me that all my friend
are on Facebook™, and since I’m not, I miss out on stuff.)

[2]: I’m not good at crypto protocols, but something to manage it so
that you can know which people read what you write, and set levels so
that you can allow some things to be kept in the ring of trust. As far
as I understand it, that’s part of the basic plan of GNU Social,
right?