Privacy implications of social networking services
This is an interesting examination of some of the aspects of social networking services, using Plaxo as an example:
Roger Clarke’s ‘Little Black Books’
I see this as a pretty big and growing problem. Not only have we not adequately explored the consequences of using these services, or the aspects of society that they reveal (or cede control over), but we have pretty close to no legal precedent for how they interact with one another.
As my recent post on orkut touched on a bit, it looks like the problems associated with these services are not limited to they way they deal with your data, but also in the way that they interact among themselves, in relation to your data. Certain services, because of the terms they dictate, can act as sinkholes to corrupt the practices of other, “gentler” services if they ever interact.
I can’t think of an example yet where this has been a problem, but let’s watch out for this.
