On Privacy
We all wear masks.
We wear a mask at work. A mask that tells people we are serious, intelligent and worth whatever we are being paid (or more).
We wear a different mask when having drinks with our friends. A mask where we want to be carefree, free from the weight of the mask worn at work.
We wear a different mask when we are all alone with our partner(s)/spouse(s). A mask where we can sometime share our deepest desires and fears (and often a mask where we cannot).
We even wear a mask when we talk to ourselves. The mask that says we are simultaneously both the greatest and worst person that has ever lived (the subject for a much longer post).
When I read about privacy on social networks, I can typically unwind the issue to really be about what projections of self (a mask) that the network supports.
Most only support a few masks (public and/or friends) and often poorly. This causes people to “under share”, use a different network for that mask, or just opt-out completely.
An interesting observation is that these masks are often (roughly) organized in a subset/superset relationship.
This observation could help make this problem more tractable, although I do believe that a network needs to enable the same level of control that I have today — essentially the ability to construct a mask for each individual in the network.
I could spend several years talking about why these masks exist in the first place (religious, cultural, biological, etc.), but social networks like Facebook or Robert Scoble are not going to make them go away.
What we need is a social network that understands these masks and supports them in a first class way.
The first one that does will become the essessial platform (a utility) for the next generation of applications.
So true. The anti-piracy advocates are just reflecting the wishes of the search engine companies.
Joe
11 May 10 at 02:43
I agree, Doug, and I’ve even thought about this.
I mean, your first diagram is basically a faceted view of relationships. The second one is a layered view. Neither really work, because both you and I can think of scenarios where we quickly see that these are set-based relationships, and complex ones at that. Then we start thinking, ok, what kind of mechanism can we set up that lets us express that relationship while at the same time giving (or excluding) a public view of each of those sets that define our personality for a certain group.
Then I go to a Wal-Mart, look around, and realized I just wasted a lot of fucking time on that mental exercise.
David Weller
11 May 10 at 03:26
For a human (not a company or other ‘entity’), the one-to-many relationship only applies to the “Public”, people the user doesn’t know at all. The rest is a one-to-one relationship. Always. And each relationship has its own ‘mask’. The problem with this mask is the human unpredictability and constant changing of projections based on circumstances. We can change the ‘mask’ in real life without any effort, however, changing the mask in a ’social network’ will become quickly something unmaintainable. Oh, and adding an overlay mask over a current mask (like ‘funny mask’ applied over the ‘co-worker I rarely talk to’ mask) will just add to the confusion. “To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain”.
Humans are hard to model. Dial ‘HM’ for human modeling language.
Alin
11 May 10 at 14:44
Agree. I said the same thing in a different way in my 1999 book. Here’s the section, which includes a similar-but-different diagram:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/pracintgr/chapter/ch04_01.html#gw-ch-4-sect-1
I still think about this in terms of concentric scopes. To be effective we need the ability to move interactions outward, to larger scopes, when there is a need to broaden the interaction, and inward, to narrower scopes, when there is a need to focus the interaction. Both maneuvers are crucial in different situations for different reasons, but it’s tricky to pull them off smoothly and competently.
What would first-class support look like for such maneuvers? One aspect: The ability to visualize and evaluate the current scope, assess the need/opportunity to change scope, and measure the resulting effects on visibility and influence.
Jon Udell
11 May 10 at 19:00
So true. The anti-piracy advocates are just reflecting the wishes of the search engine companies.
Bruce
19 May 10 at 17:24
So true. The anti-piracy advocates are just reflecting the wishes of the search engine companies.
Alexis
5 Jul 10 at 13:43
[...] know the doctrine and techniques, but it is not part of who I am, just another mask that I put on when it is [...]
On Buddhism
12 Aug 10 at 20:58