What about privacy in Social Semantic Web?
Tim Berners-Lee has written this interesting blog post about the Social Graph. Having just completed my master’s thesis in this topic, pointing out some of the same ideas and opinions, I am looking towards the future with great anticipation.
“So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL.”
This is one of the main conclusions of the thesis. Another point of the thesis is that users will loose control as a side effect of the Social Semantic Web, as Tim also points out:
“The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.”
I do however tend to disagree in his argument that “It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous”. That is the pros of “Social Semantic Software” outweigh the cons of loss of privacy. Just recently thousands of Facebook users have protestedagainst the Facebook Beacon service as they felt their privacy invaded. Opposite of Tim I do not believe this to be merely a temporary phenomenon. At all the abstraction levels, the Net, the Web and the Graph, we have protected our private and personal information using firewalls and access restrictions. In the “Giant Global Graph”such protection is not possible.
Does that mean that Semantic Web Technology does not provide any value to users of Social Software? No, it can provide great value, but I believe that it is vital that we have a discussion about how to ensure the privacy of the users. This discussion is bound to end up with a compromise between the “Giant Global Graph” and privacy.
Furthermore there are reasons why one would not want a Giant Global Graph. One is multiple identities; e.g. I would like to keep my professional LinkedIn Graph separate from my personal Facebook Graph. That would not be possible to do in a Giant Social Graph.
As I started out, I am looking forward to seeing Semantic Social Software, but it is not as picture perfect as Tim would like it to be….
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Tags: social software Tim Berners-Lee giant global graph
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