If the conventional wisdom is that whatever we place on the Internet is there for public consumption, researcher Danah Boyd has a different idea. She believes that it's an abuse of privacy when Internet services take content meant for smaller audiences and make them more widely public.
Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. She made a pretty aggressive point in her call-out of Google and Facebook for making some provisions public unless you opt out and for making many changes without adequately informing users.
In recent months Facebook has had to respond to concerns --- the most strenuous ones here in Canada --- that it was sharing too much information with third parties and gathering too much without the clear consent of users. Google, meanwhile, took enormous criticism for its roll-out of Google Buzz; it has since tapered some provisions.
But Boyd said privacy and publicity are not binary, that there are things you say in a room that you don't want repeated --- there needs to be a digital equivalent of that respect for privacy, she argued.
Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. She made a pretty aggressive point in her call-out of Google and Facebook for making some provisions public unless you opt out and for making many changes without adequately informing users.
In recent months Facebook has had to respond to concerns --- the most strenuous ones here in Canada --- that it was sharing too much information with third parties and gathering too much without the clear consent of users. Google, meanwhile, took enormous criticism for its roll-out of Google Buzz; it has since tapered some provisions.
But Boyd said privacy and publicity are not binary, that there are things you say in a room that you don't want repeated --- there needs to be a digital equivalent of that respect for privacy, she argued.
