ErrantPixels

There are some things that are just expected in the whole blogging/social-networking when it comes to privacy and transparency. Sure, you stick a blog up there for the whole world to read, the whole world includes people you may not immediately realize (Future employers, romantic interests, whatever, it’s out there). But the level of data collection, and how these sites are using it gets even deeper than that.

Take LinkedIn for example, a relatively innocent, innocuous “6 degrees” type of site for working professionals. No gaudy backgrounds, music, or any of the other garbage, its just supposed to be for professionals finding other professionals. But think about it, there has to be some revenue thoughts or concepts for the type of data those connections and linkings bring to the organizer. Even the links and connections that you dont even explictly make. I was adding a previous cowoker to my “network” today, and was presented with a dialog:

Add people you might know:

• Person 1, Acme
• Person 2, Meh
• Person 3, Starbucks

The odd thing being, I don’t know any of those people professionally, just socially, and tangentially at best really. Being security minded, I’ve never allowed the site a view in to my gmail address book or AIM contact list (Seriously people, giving your password to your email to a third party? Really? No wonder phishing schemes work), but they did, months ago, LinkedIn is being helpful in a way, making the connection for you.

Here’s the deal though, some of these service providers, like Google, add casual contacts and all kinds of things to your address book. It’s not a one shot deal where you let LinkedIn log in to your gmail account, and present “oh yeah, this person in your address book is also signed up, you can quickly add them now” — They keep that data, forever, so when that really bad date you had 2 years ago and exchanged emails with signs up with them 6 months from now they’ll occasionally get a notice “We think you might know So and So” .

Interesting stuff.