[LINK] Why Irkut ?

[Jan Whitaker]

At 07:42 AM 9/02/04 +1100, Roger Clarke wrote:
>I agree that it's feasible to design a privacy-sensitive social networking 
>service.  But the ones I've looked at so far are anything but 
>privacy-sensitive;  and I have doubts that there's a lot of money to be 
>made from it, other than by exploitation of consumer data.

I wonder too if there might be some 'bad feelings' in result from these 
things.  I received my first plaxo request which didn't look at first to be 
a plaxo request.  I thought it was a friend who really was updating 
contacts. When I saw that the return address was plaxo, I switched to my 
friend's personal address and declined from being included.  I explained 
the problem of some services reserving the right to sell all this info as 
the 'asset' if they sell the business, so there is nothing to stop them 
selling to a marketing company or rebadging as one.  I also pointed out 
that the optout option on the email wasn't satisfactory because all that 
does is confirm a live address.

She sent me [and others presumably bcc] a report.  That's fine, but I 
wonder if there will be less thought to sending such things that weren't of 
interest to me in the first place as a result of blanket mailings like 
this?  She is careful to say she will remove people from distribution if 
they aren't interested.

Jan


JLWhitaker Associates
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at melbpc.org.au  --  http://member.melbpc.org.au/~jwhit/whitentr.htm
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