living in the glass house

Webmonday Aachen yesterday featured great talks (video available) and lively discussions.

Technologies like XFN enable exchange of social network data between different carriers. Now people can search your social network through the Google Social Graph API.

As it stands, there is a real concern for user backlash as these APIs start being implemented and users find themselves presented with eerily accurate information about themselves magically appearing on websites without their ‘consent’.

Suddenly even people in the dataportability camp start scratching their heads about the implications of unbridled data sharing.

The separation between our online identities is a feature, not a bug. Unifying our fragmented online selves into a total identity is not only technically difficult (XFN is vulnerable to relationship injection attacks). It's also epistemologically unsound.

Not everything that can be done, should be done. We should be talking less about technology, and more about what we want. And especially about what we don't want.

If you start thinking about social data control, it soon becomes clear that ownership of social data, like opensocialweb.org claims in their Bill of Rights, is a fiction. If Alice publishes a link rel="friend" relation with Bob, and Claire publishes a link rel="coworker" relationship with Bob, we know a lot about Bob without having to ask Bob. It ain't Bob's data, and it ain't under his control. That's because it's social data.

Combine this brewing privacy backlash with mounting signs of social media fatigue and you may start to wonder if, maybe, social networking has reached the peak of it's hype cycle?