My Digital FootPrint

Internet players wrestling for control of your footprint Whatever the personal reason for joining and participating in social networking, the debate has moved from being fashionable to how the key social networking players can unwittingly extend their influence and control of you.   Facebook wants to move from the confines of their own social networking cloud and be able to monitise property outside of their immediate control; hence the introduction by Facebook of opengraph and ‘Like’. The understanding of these new tools is, however, being over shadowed by the privacy setting debate which is also critical to the new Facebook model and its new utility.  The privacy setting allows Facebook to gain relationship data (digital footprint) and together with the tools change the internet from a Google ad centric world, into a relationship dependant Facebook ad centric world.   Issue 101. Control of Privacy settings It has become evident that social networks will live or die by their privacy p

Internet players wrestling for control of your footprint Whatever the personal reason for joining and participating in social networking, the debate has moved from being fashionable to how the key social networking players can unwittingly extend their influence and control of you.   Facebook wants to move from the confines of their own social networking cloud and be able to monitise property outside of their immediate control; hence the introduction by Facebook of opengraph and ‘Like’. The understanding of these new tools is, however, being over shadowed by the privacy setting debate which is also critical to the new Facebook model and its new utility.  The privacy setting allows Facebook to gain relationship data (digital footprint) and together with the tools change the internet from a Google ad centric world, into a relationship dependant Facebook ad centric world.   Issue 101. Control of Privacy settings It has become evident that social networks will live or die by their privacy p

Interview for Ogilvy Verge event where I am speaking on 1 st June in Lisbon http://www.ionline.pt/conteudo/60379-o-facebook-nao-matou-privacidade-nos-e-q...

Interview for Ogilvy Verge event where I am speaking on 1 st June in Lisbon http://www.ionline.pt/conteudo/60379-o-facebook-nao-matou-privacidade-nos-e-q...

Interview for Ogilvy Verge event where I am speaking on 1 st June in Lisbon http://www.ionline.pt/conteudo/60379-o-facebook-nao-matou-privacidade-nos-e-q...

Monitising mobile (data and infomation)  

http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/ The website provides an independent and open tool for scanning your Facebook privacy settings.

An important question to consider when thinking about digital footprints and what you post about yourself.  If you were interviewing someone, what would you prefer? 1. someone who lies about their past 2. someone who hides their past 3. someone who is honest about their past 4. someone who is proud of their past It could be that your history is a great way to show how you have changed and matured, grown up, learnt to manage risk.  Your history, success and mistakes are not your millstone - it is why your have your values

An important question to consider when thinking about digital footprints and what you post about yourself.  If you were interviewing someone, what would you prefer? 1. someone who lies about their past 2. someone who hides their past 3. someone who is honest about their past 4. someone who is proud of their past It could be that your history is a great way to show how you have changed and matured, grown up, learnt to manage risk.  Your history, success and mistakes are not your millstone - it is why your have your values

An important question to consider when thinking about digital footprints and what you post about yourself.  If you were interviewing someone, what would you prefer? 1. someone who lies about their past 2. someone who hides their past 3. someone who is honest about their past 4. someone who is proud of their past It could be that your history is a great way to show how you have changed and matured, grown up, learnt to manage risk.  Your history, success and mistakes are not your millstone - it is why your have your values

Image from http://www.hmrinsurance.ca/privacy_and_disclosure.html "Privacy: began when people stopped believing that God could see everything and ended when government realised there was a vacancy to fill"  Roger Needham

Great news article from the BBC Facebook has downplayed the significance of a company-wide meeting to discuss privacy issues. As people choose to delete their profile, awareness grows that giving up you privacy is a trade, and that trade is not always fair. In response Diaspora Here are four talented young programmers from NYU’s Courant Institute trying to raise money so we can spend the summer building Diaspora; an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data. OneSocialWeb The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Elgg  It provides the components you need to build a fully-featured social environment: Appleseed   The Appleseed Project is an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model. For instance, a profile on one Appleseed website could "friend" a profile on another Appleseed website, and the two profiles could int

Which UK operator has best network? Mobile News Industry expert Tony Fish , a consultant who has worked with operators on issues with mobile data, reckons the question of which network has the best ...

So you have got yourself into a digital mess. Pictures that are not fitting for the new image, blog posts that are not so in thinking with the new role, friends who are just links and you need it all cleaned up.  Alas life coaches and other ‘social engineers’ are re-branding and emerging with a promise that they will come and save you.  The guarantee is that they will clean it all up and start again….  Please don’t fall for anyone who promises to clean up your digital past.   Just a quick change of name, a new profile or a new privacy setting is not the answer, neither is deleting, re-starting, clearing cookies or buying a new computer as this is only the data that is in your control.  The content you need to think about is what others have said about you, not what you say about yourself.

    This post puts into words the fundamental shift that I have had difficulty in explaining for a while.  I believed that the prime privacy issues were erosion and  fear but now I think it is an adjustment to a new paradigm of what public means.  Public tends to mean information is available and current (news) or available but inaccessible (marriage record). The majority of us understand public in its “current public” form as it is about here and now (broadcast TV, radio, daily newspapers). This view of public was friendly as it naturally leads to a softening or erosion over time until forgiven and forgotten. With the advent of the Internet public now carries the same meanings but we have added a third dimension; always there, no control, no hiding, permanent and always accessible.    How can privacy die? Privacy is closer to gravity and electrons, in the mind of the public, than to bricks and trees, so how can it die?  Privacy is a concept, something you explain but cannot touch and

http://www.ghostery.com/ If you want to understand what others see or are worried about what someone can glean then consider this great little addin for FF, IE and Chrome.  Ghostery provides a window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity. 

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