An article in the New Scientist by Paul Marks has crossed my desktop a number of times today. Entitled “Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites”, the story examines the efforts of our government to explore online social networks. Even as a relatively new entrant to the field, this is not surprising; for quite some time, our intelligence agencies have invested heavily in the analysis of social networks. How we connect, who we connect to, and the properties of these connections are incredibly valuable intelligence assets – and their study is deeply precedented.
The story grabbed some sensational headlines, particularly at Slashdot; Tim O’Reilly clarified things quite a bit in this post. All of this made me think back to a NYT Op-Ed I read a few weeks back, which I was lucky enough to re-find. In the context of the NSA Wiretapping revelation, Jonathan David Farley explored the challenges of using social network analysis to track terrorists – a worthwhile read.
Today, I spent a few hours preparing an academic poster about ClaimID that Terrell and I will present on Monday. In doing so, I had to re-hash all the original theory that went into ClaimID – thinking about what our “digital footprints” say about us. As the web encourages us to publicly articulate our social networks, as more and more of us live online, the challenges of maintaining a multiplex public identity compound significantly. This is a new life-mode, and nothing less.
Tags: claimid, facebook, social networks
I’ve been wondering for some time if the only way to protect yourself online is publish as much stuff about yourself as possible. I read Chris Messina‘s comments about this and blogged about it here. What do you think Fred?
Taking a proactice approach like that makes sense – the only problem is it doesn’t scale. One of the things I’ve learned from ClaimID is that there’s only a small number of people who are benefactors of online dialogue – while many of us participate all over the place, not many of us are being written about. Flooding the network isn’t context appropriate for a lot of people – we just aren’t there yet.
The key problem is once stuff gets out – what do we do with it. Our Facebook profile gets posted to a blog. Someone writes something nasty about us. What do we do? It is logical to say – well, if there’s something negative about me, I’ll write ten positive things and it will even out. Again, though, that just doesnt scale. Google your high school classmates. Google an IBM support engineer. The vast majority of society is living outside of the net.
This is changing, though, and in a big way. Students put so much about themselves online – as they have been doing their entire lives. Privacy is lost – but we’re not yet comfortable with privacy through transparency. I keep my personal life off this blog, and I always will. We’re just not there yet.
When I talk about issues like this, I call it one of the key challenges of information science for the next ten years. How we deal with this..the vast cultural changes under our feet, the legal changes above our heads…will come to define a generation.