Mike English's blog

(Here come the questions…)

What are the essential elements of a profile page?

• your name
• your contact information
• a picture or avatar
• some kind of bio, or a few self-descriptive words
• what else?

What contact information should be included on a profile page?

• e-mail
• twitter
• instant messaging
• phone?

Eventually these questions become more about privacy than accessibility.

But what does privacy mean on the open web?

With the advent of social networking websites, and especially since the increased popularity of Facebook and Twitter we’ve grown accustomed to living publicly. We no longer think twice about updating Twitter or our Facebook status to let the entire world know where we are, or what we’re doing. Why?

Part of this has to do, I think, with knowing that this information is of interest to our own existing social groups. It’s nice to know what your friends are up to. On the other hand, are we at greater risk by exposing this information? By using services like brightkite or Dopplr are we simply asking to be kidnapped, or to have our houses looted in our absence?

In my personal experience, doubts about these new web-ventures have usually been dismissed as old-fashioned and out of place. There’s a new paradigm, we’re working toward a new reality, and these old fears need to be set aside on the frontier of innovation.

The new reality, as I see it, is one where technology works for people.  The new social web is one where our virtual interactions begin to mimic the subtleties of ‘real life‘ social interaction. But there are a lot of difficulties in manifesting this vision. At the forefront is the problem of privacy. In real life you don’t go to great lengths to hide information about yourself, but you don’t rattle off everything you’ve ever done the first second you meet someone either. In real life we get to know people gradually; we become acquainted with them over time and more intimate channels of communication may or may not be opened.

If you strike up a conversation with someone in a coffeehouse for example, you don’t give them your home phone, mobile phone, mailing address, weekly schedule, favorite books, favorite movies, and who knows what else in the first five minutes of conversation, and before you get to know them as a person. But this is how it works on the web right now, it’s usually all or nothing, because we treat profiles like business cards. Not that this isn’t useful, but for the average user, it becomes difficult to decide what information to share.

The other thing about real life information sharing is that it is almost always managed subconsiously on an individual basis. We think about our relationship with each person we interact with, and they often don’t fall into clear-cut categories. The categorical model of relationships assumption that most social websites with privacy controls make is inadequate.

Mimicking the safety of this individual and gradual sharing of information is difficult on the web. On the web, we like everything to be automatic and ready to go. We don’t want to spend our time managing our information, we want to spend it actually being social. It’s easier to build in levels of privacy to a closed, centralized network like Facebook. But on the open web, lack of universal standards makes managing privacy a dauntingly time-consuming task. Is it worth the effort? How badly do we need our privacy? How do we think about privacy on the open web? Are our models analogous to real world social interaction? Can they be?

EDIT:

Chris Saad points out that “traditional ideas of privacy are changing.” Are these changes a natural evolution, or are they sparked by the inability of the Internet’s global interconnectedness, the “global village” model, to mimic traditional social relations?  If the later, and if we treat this effect of technology on our lives as acceptable, the Internet potentially stands to have a larger cultural impact than I think anyone yet expects.