I have a Plaxo account which I haven’t used it for months because it was connected to a little used email account. I finally went in last week to accept all the people who have invited me to connect.
Plaxo is interesting because it also seeks out and aggregates other stuff you have posted. I’m not clear how it happens and it misses stuff (like it doesn’t pick up this blog) but it somehow picked up on my Amazon wishlist postings.
To be specific, it picked up on a Wii game that my kid wanted me to buy for him and figured that if I put it on my wish list, I would get around to it at some point.
Seeing the game come up spooked me slightly. What else had I put on the wishlist and had been published to my plaxo list? Thankfully, the list was pretty tame but it got me thinking again about privacy and the concept of a universal identity.
Shouldn’t it be my decision on what content gets created on my behalf or did I give that right up because the Amazon wishlist is public?
I went back and re-read the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web (Joseph Smarr, the Chief Platform Architect of Plaxo is one of the authors) which is focused on data portability and openness. I really like the idea of interconnecting services but how do we then keep personal and private separate if we so desire?
For some of my friends this isn’t an issue but for most people there are probably areas that they would want to keep off limits. It is a sliding scale depending on how much of your life you are comfortable with airing publically.
Here is a great example. There is an art dealer through whom I have bought and sold prints over the years. I lost her details and looked up her name on the web. I was intrigued to find that she had listed herself on her myspace gallery page as a ‘swinger’. Now that may be a selling point to some punters but I wouldn’t want to take the chance. Would you?
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