Convenience vs. Privacy

As you may remember, in August of last year, I wrote a blog post showing you how to fill in the missing gaps of information for your contacts in your address book.  However, at the time, what I did not think about is where this information was coming from, how it was being gathered, and whether it was an invasion of someone's privacy.

It turns out there are several data mining services out there that know more about you than you probably know yourself, or have forgotten about yourself.  Every time you register for a website, fill out a profile, or even leave comments on a fourm/bulletin board, you are leaving an impression of yourself on the web.  That digital impression is now up for the world to see and your email address becomes almost as closely tied to your identity as your Social Security Number.

Let's go further down the rabbit hole with the article "How to Fetch Public Data about People Using Email Addresses"

Third-party services and vendors

These companies are data-mining your social graph to build a representation of your digital life.

Google's Social Graph API

Let's start with something small and "non-threatening" such as Google's Social Graph API.

With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

 The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them. The API cannot access non-public information, such as private profile pages or websites accessible to a limited group of friends.

 We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.

 
On the surface, it sounds harmless enough and even makes sense.  In fact, you've probably seen this level of service being used when you log into sites like Twitter or LinkedIn or any number of a hunder sites where they ask you to log in using an OAuth ID such as your Google/Twitter/LinkedIn/Hotmail/AOL/Yahoo/etc...

BUT- that is when the information is used for good.

Didn't you ever what other information is behind the curtain this magical, invisible curtain?

When the API was first announced, that very question, along with its privacy implications were discussed in such articles as

•  
  • Is Google's Social Graph API a Creeping Privacy Violation?
  • Google unleashes Social Graph API--indexes people connections

RAPLEAF

If you export all of your contacts from GIST, you'll notice that one of the line-items shows that some of the missing contact information came from Rapleaf as well as Google's Social Graph API.

Originally, Rapleaf’s API returned information about a person’s social networking accounts if you supplied an email, but it has recently switched to offering demographic data on age, gender, income, and address instead. The FindByEmail code still uses the old V2 API. Since the service gathers data without any user involvement (though it does operate an opt out system), it’s been controversial. - "How to Fetch Public Data about People Using Email Addresses" Apr 07 2011

• How Rapleaf works
• How to opt out of Rapleaf

We also recommend visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page to manage other advertising cookies used by your web browser.

For more information about managing ad targeting and online profiles please visit PrivacyChoice  and ReputationDefender .

JIGSAW

...searchable online database of companies and key employees...relies on crowd-sourcing to collect the data. Using Wikipedia as an example, crowd-sourcing encourages people to add information on their own. With contributions from Jigsaw's more than 1.2 million members, the company said that its database now provides contact information on more than 21 million professionals from nearly 4 million companies. - C|Net April 21, 2010

In April of 2010, this database was seen to be so incredibly valuable, that it was bought by Salesforce for $142 million dollars.

ZOOMINFO

You may think that ZoomInfo is just another player in this market space, but you'd be wrong.

Whereas Rapleaf is powering GIST, and Jigsaw was bought by Salesforce, ZoomInfo is currently being used as the resource database powering Plaxo's Personal Assistant service.

MISC

And those are just 3 of the MAJOR power players in this industry, but there are several more out there, trying to make a name for themselves with YOUR data.  Here are some, just to name a few:

• • Pipl (http://pipl.com/)
  • myLife (http://www.mylife.com/)
  • Spokeo (http://www.spokeo.com/)

So where is the middle-ground?

So now that we know what information is out there, what do we want to do about it?

Almost all of us want the convenience of a service automatically updating our contacts whenever they make a change to their profile.  Then we wouldn't have to worry about losing touch with someone regardless of who they are whether they are the closest members of your family, to a valuable business contact, to someone you met through social media, to someone you networked with 2-3 years ago, etc...

BUT, in today's world of on-line identity theft, inbox spam, and personal privacy, how much of that information is too much?  Just look at the privacy up-roar that overpowers the Internet whenever a change is made on Facebook.

Some companies like Plaxo, Soocial, and Gist are trying to solve this by getting their users to convince their friends and family to join them on one of these services so that the changes are kept within their closed network.  While these closed networks are good because it prevents outside forces from grabbing and exploiting your personal data, not everyone may want to use the same service or have the same needs.

You may be thinking, well everyone's on Facebook, why not stick with what works?  I go back to the privacy issues and that more people are locking down their personal information from being available from everyone else.  When that happens, you are not always going to be told when someon update's their contact info, nor will it automatically update in your own personal address book.  The same is true for Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc...

Perhaps you're considering all this talk about Data Portability.  Keep in mind that is just saying that you own your data and can take it with you whereever you want, not that it will automatically talk to each other.

OAuth?  OpenID?  These are just a means of authentication to access a website.

Unfortunately, there is no common ground, yet.  The closest that I could find is the Portable Contacts project, but since all these companies want to own their own data and not share by making them compatible with each other, we are a long way off.  Until then, your contacts are still going to need that manual touch-up every now and then.