I joined Friendster, Ryze, Linked-in, Tribe.Net, Yafro, Plaxo and Spoke and stand amazed at the amount of data they hold. If social networking sites continue with the success they’ve had over the last year, Scott McNealy’s quip “you have zero privacy anyway, so get over it,” will be as true as the maxim that knowledge is power.
One issue we need to address is what really, really needs to be private and then how we ensure that it stays that way. Everything else goes public, life gets easier, we are all better informed, progress happens.
But, for many people, that will be a big step to take.
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Key issue — overlooked sometimes (see this link http://www.drsnet.org/preoccupations/2004/01/privacy_social_.html) by those in “the movement”.
What needs to be private? Everything. After all its your data.
That is the philosophy we took when we built WiredReach . Social networking and privacy DO NOT have to be mutually exclusive. We accomplished this by adopting a 100% decentralized architecture where no data is ever stored on servers. Users decide what they advertise (relationships, information, files, etc.) and to whom (trusted relationships).