I hear you’ve been going back on your word, Microsoft Live.  I hear you’re talking behind people’s backs, giving away all their secrets.

If you want to change your current policies on accepting anonymous comments, fine.   But when you promise a user that the comment they are about to submit is anonymous,  that promise should mean something.  Forever, not just until your next TOS change.  You shouldn’t have even stored information about who made a comment if they asked you to keep that comment anonymous.

People trusted you and believed in you, and they acted according to their trust and belief.  They didn’t know that anonymous really meant “tracked, stored, and correlated, but hidden only until we decide otherwise”.

Those of you out there who think anonymous comments are only about making nasty retorts or spamming- think again.  Sometimes, anonymity enables people to talk about their health, their relationships, their issues, their innermost thoughts, things they would otherwise be afraid to reveal.  Sometimes, anonymity enables an intimacy that can be a lifeline in rough seas.   Anonymous comments can be as deeply personal as any church confession – imagine if your confessions were taped, played to the world, and associated to you forever more.

I suppose the only moral of this story is to assume the worst about any technology that makes promises around secrecy.  Perhaps this will encourage pseudonymity – at least then you’re known to be tracked, but you can control what correlation might exist to your real name.  If nothing else, this should call into question the practices of any service that supplies that little “post as anonymous” checkbox.

Marc Canter says (or at least implies) that a social network with 5 people in it isn’t a real social network. I couldn’t disagree more.

There are 4 people in my immediate family, and let me tell you, there is no more social network out there.

What defines a social network? Number of hits? Ad revenue? If you ask me, the tool doesn’t define the social network – the community does. And I believe communities come in all sizes and shapes. I see nothing wrong with a small group of people wishing to collaborate in the cloud – it sounds a heck of a lot nicer than Facebook, truth be told.

My favorite social networks are not the monster amalgamations of strangers that form the current la-dee-da Web 2.0 acquisition market. My favorite social networks are kind of like the corner bar — where everybody knows your name (or at least your nick) and where you have a history that means something to others, while simultaneously caring about the history others have built with you. Why did Flickr users grieve when they lost their original identifiers? Because it was a little piece of their community history, taken away, diluted into a homogenized mix by a service with altered goals.

Saying a social network isn’t successful or shouldn’t be counted because it is small is like only counting a restaurant as successful if it has a franchise attached – who cares about the corner cafe, when you could have a Burger King, right?

I care. I suspect a lot of other folks care too.

I just read about the Open Social Web API: it would seem that a bunch of the silos of the world are about to begin using a common API to talk to their apps (and maybe each other?) about, among other things, previously sequestered identities and relationships.

I’m monstrously curious about if and/or how identities will be mapped between “containers”. I’m curious about the whole thing, in fact, as both a user of such services and as an identity control freak. I can’t wait to see what mechanisms are used, and whether something with some kind of identity & privacy cachet was tapped.

Will I like what I find? This quote from Brian Oberkirch makes me wonder:

Finally, I’ve seen no mention of the fact that every bit moved through these APIs will be mapped via Gdata into a great Google graph of social interaction. A version of Brad Fitzpatrick’s master graph, but part of the Googleverse.

Call me crazy, but isn’t a “master social graph” without any reference to consent or control from the user really just internet-scale involuntary identity aggregation? I don’t care whether the “social graph” is in fashion or not, I sure as hell hope that I can opt out if I so choose. I imagine that both the terms of service and privacy agreements for any partner service involved in the Open Social API will have to to change, and I shall be very interested to see what exactly those changes will be.

No matter what, this API is still a critical first step. Inertia is being overcome with respect to opening up user community silos. The what is good – but all of us scrappy identity and privacy folks had better hasten to examine the how, too.

Here is a perfect example of what happens when data you prefer to keep private ends up in the wrong hands. Or worse, when data about another person becomes public, and can then be used to infer information about you based on a past or present, direct or even indirect relationship with that person. In this case, there isn’t even proof, but rumor is more than enough if the spotlight is bright.

(via Jezebel, image from HolyCandy)

Have you seen this?

Virgin Mobile in Australia created an ad campaign around a number of photos taken from Flickr. All of the photos were licensed for commerical use, but it seems that many of the photographers had no idea of what it means to allow commercial use of their photos, and what it specifically means to allow commercial use of photos of fellow humans.

The ad company took photos from and of regular people and added captions that implied often-derogatory situations, meant to resonate with ‘hip’ audience members. For example, the ad shown here is a picture of a young girl in a goofy pose flashing the peace sign, and the caption is ‘Dump your Pen Friend’. The link above is worth travelling to — because the very first comment on the picture is the young girl herself, having discovered that she is in the photo. The second comment is from the photographer, having discovered that his photo was used. The comment stream is enlightening.

Another affected party was geekgirl Molly Holzschlag, who was one of a group of people photographed in an elevator during what I presume to be a tech conference. Their photo was captioned “People who talk in lifts have bad breath”.

There is the beginnings of a collection of the various photos here. More discussion on the subject is here, here, and here.

There are all sorts of debates around this issue – but my personal favorite ironic conclusion is that anyone who wants to be litigious about this matter will mostly likely have to sue not just Virgin Mobile and/or the ad company, but also whatever close personal friend was uninformed enough to take a photograph of their friend(s) and then license it for commercial use without having understood the responsibilities and liabilities involved. Can Virgin Mobile successfully use their photographer-mules as shields to stay out of the court-room?

The other interesting question to me is — how does the world end up regarding companies that make this kind of ruckus? How will Virgin Mobile end up regarding their own campaign? This case has obvious educational value, both from a privacy perspective and also prospective amateur content license users — it is a use case that can be cited over and again, because people will intuitively get the issues at hand – after all, who hasn’t taken or posed for that one embarrassing photo. Meanwhile, Virgin Mobile Australia has managed to garner a world-wide audience for their ads. Perhaps the press is negative — but will the ruffled feathers fade away, leaving only the remembrance of the brand? My guess is that it will.

Photos on sharing sites such as Flickr are a simple example of one person having power over another person’s identity information. For obscure subjects, the power is small, and mistakes in things like licensing are not important. Yet – all it takes is a spotlight to change things. This isn’t new, or specific to Web 2.0 — how may recording artists have signed horrible contracts before they made it big, at the time just grateful to have the contract at all?

All I can say is, I’m off to check the licenses on a few photos that I really wouldn’t like to be part of a national ad campaign :)