Who Wants To Know? Social Networks and Privacy Issues.
Google has increasingly come under attack for compromising the privacy of its users, most recently with the company’s "remarketing" tool. Other tech companies, meanwhile, have enjoyed free reign to operate as they wish as Google plays the fall guy to privacy advocates.
Until now.
Increasingly, it seems that this is not merely an Eric Schmidt – or even just a Google problem. While Schmidt clearly takes the cake for his casual approach to these issues, more questions are being raised over whether there is a trend of disturbing practices within the tech sector in general.
This week, Facebook expanded the scope of its Gross National Happiness index. The application measures how often positive and negative words are used in Facebook users' status updates to gauge how happy its users are. Initially launched as a U.S.-exclusive project, the index now measures which periods of the calendar Facebook users in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. are most happy.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn is keeping tally of which companies most successfully attract displaced employees from the financial services industry. The online business networking company posted this question on its corporate blog last month: “Where did all the people go from the collapsed financial institutions?” Then, the company posted a detailed flow chart that demonstrated which financial services companies hired most of the employees displaced by Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch. While individual workers may not mind LinkedIn charting their migration – they did after all post their employment history on their personal profile – not all employers will feel comfortable with LinkedIn publishing their recruitment habits.
The Gross National Happiness index and LinkedIn’s displaced worker chart make available data that provides an interesting window into how we relate to the world. Still, the question remains, just how publicly available should that data be?
Alison Harkins, president of Harkins Law Group, P.C., spoke about this trend of mining social networks for data. She said, “There is a lot of information that can be tracked. Companies often come up with new technologies, but don’t have all of the long-term implications worked out yet.”
I would be curious to know the methods that were used to create these indexes and whether the identities of the users were scrubbed. Only the companies know; calls placed to LinkedIn and Facebook were not returned by press time.
Especially if the companies were able to tell us something other than that we are more happy on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
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