President/Founder of DPCI

As President of DPCI, Joe directs all operations, business development, R&D, partnerships and marketing activities at the company.

Joe enjoys blogging about various trends in content technologies, on project management best practices, and also on his insights into the operations of running the business of DPCI.

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November 18, 2008

Privacy Redux

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Last week I had the opportunity to sit on an industry panel at MarkLogic's Digital Publishing Summit. A woman from the audience gesticulated to the four hapless panelists and declared we were all 'legacy' executives and where were the young guys driving the 'Net. Needless to say, I was a bit nonplussed, but this did stick in my craw enough for a week to collect my thoughts. Bear with me and I'll tie back to the topic later in this blog.

As I reported in a previous blog, I lost my wallet last month, which freaked me out from a security and privacy standpoint. This past month I've been thinking a great deal about security, privacy, and 'reputation management.' I'm a bit addicted to a number of 'social networking' platforms. Recently I was amazed to see that some friend of a friend uploaded an image of a guy I went to high school bubbling a bong in the back of an early '80's station wagon with the caption "BUSTED". The fellow's image was tagged with his identity. Funny? Sort of, to most people. But to the guy taking a hit off the bong, 25 years later, maybe not the most flattering picture of him nor a way that he'd want his kids or his employers to remember him by.

The interesting thing about the social networking environment is that anyone can say anything about anyone, or upload whatever content they'd like, and it becomes part of the public record and difficult to suppress or remove. In fact, people themselves often will post personal information that is readily searchable -- information like their birth dates, addresses, telephone numbers, names of children, and personal tidbits -- without considering the security implications of that information being misused.

Now turning back to where I started the blog.

I've heard a number of people claim that the younger generation doesn't care about privacy -- that they grew up in a world where their lives are open books. I couldn't disagree more that there is anything particularly different about THIS young generation's sensitivity to privacy or security than mine or the ones before mine wouldn't have ignored at the same age. In your teens or twenties, it is rare to have a historic perspective, or to consider consequences about presenting information about yourself in an open-book approach. Kids have little to lose financially (at least I didn't when I was bussing tables in restaurants during high school and college) and don't have the other concerns that grownups have about the safety of their family members.

What is also interesting to me is how many adults in this day and age seem to have little sensitivity to protecting their privacy on social networking platforms -- somehow, we all take the optimistic world view of these new playing grounds without attending to the fact that there are predators on the Internet looking to exploit personal information.

We at DPCI recently developed a private label social networking platform for a customer where the member base consists of people with net worth of over $300 million. I mention that customer because I've never seen such a locked-down secure environment -- we in fact had to add another 500 hours to the project just to tighten security and privacy on the system far beyond the original scope. Imagine one instance when the confidential information of those people fell into the wrong hands?

Should we all become paranoid and recoil from the very positive opportunities that social media offer us? To a certain extent, yes - that is, if your reputation as well as your personal information are important for you to protect.

Here are a few rules of thumb to consider when partaking in the social networking platforms:

1. Give the minimum personal information on Websites like Facebook, Myspace. There is no reason for you to put your email address, phone number, or address information out there.

2. If you're putting your birth date, it doesn't make sense for you to put the year in -- your birth date is one piece of validation information that companies use to identify who you are, along with your social security number and other information. Obviously you wouldn't want to put your mother's maiden name, your first pets name, and the like. Sounds picky? Try dealing with your identity being swiped and the concomitant life disruptions

3. Passwords -- if you do not have an 8 character alphanumeric or better, you're asking for trouble. A number of hackers have easily cracked into people's profiles and sent unsettling emails through to those individual's friends -- including email viruses

4. Befriending -- The general rule of thumb is befriend people you know, and if you don't know them, see who THEIR friends are in their profile. If you don't know any of their friends, you may be asking for trouble. Again, this comes back to your sensitivity for privacy and security, since a lot of younger single people use social networking platforms to meet other singles. Be prepared that if you befriend someone you don't know that they may use your profile for 'profile hunting', which is a way for them to befriend your friends and misuse the 'relationship'

5. Privacy settings -- In general, on any social networking platform, lock down your privacy settings so that only friends can see any of your information. I'm always amazed that people leave their profiles unlocked for anyone to see. Also, most social networking platforms allow you to exploit different levels of privacy settings, so if you group your friends, acquaintances, work buddies and so forth into different lists, you can actually configure what each group is allowed to see.

6. Set up a google alert on your name or that of your family members, your company -- whatever you would like to track, as a quick alert. Likewise with some of the social networking platforms -- like Youtube for instance -- you can set up alerts if anyone comments on your content, so that you can suppress the comments or block/report the user if the comments are derogatory or unpleasant.

There are many other tips for wending your way around social networking platforms. I'm hoping that if you have any additional ones that you will consider posting them below in the comments portion of the blog.

I think there is going to be an opportunity in 2009 for people to offer security, privacy, and reputation management monitoring services or software. I would love to see companies like Facebook offer that kind of a service -- or, a 3rd party application that will check Facebook and do the following:

1. Check your security/privacy settings and offer recommendations based on a 'wizard' that asks you questions about your sensitivity to privacy issues

2. Report back who is accessing what information in your profile

3. Alert you (email/mobile) whenever your name is used (photo/video tag, textual content, etc)

If there were a service that would go across ALL platforms on the Web, this would be a most powerful solution to help people manage their personal information. I imagine people would pay a subscription for that service in much the same way that I'm currently paying Equifax a monthly fee to manage my credit information.

Back to the woman who said I was 'legacy'...I'll take that to mean that my slightly graying hair makes me look distinguished and that I'm smarter about my use of the Web than those younguns! I attempted to contact the woman with my happy realization, but couldn't find her since apparently she has no Website, no linkedin profile, no facebook or myspace, no twitter, and absolutely no results on a google search for her name. I imagine that her personal information is probably quite safe on the Internet...

Posted at 11:08 am by Joseph Bachana