Monday, June 29, 2009

Data privacy on social networks


EU privacy regulators are trying to improve data privacy but suggest a rather impractical approach in my view. Data privacy law like this already applies to published photos in news outlets, but even those are nigh impossible to regulate and enforce.

What would you do if you have a photo of yourself with a crowd in the background - get permission from every one of the 100 people in the photo before uploading? Not really thought out. What about people who are not using the platform, how could you get the permission verified? No obvious system to deal with that.

The old but very useful recommendation of having profiles default on private would do much more to solve the problem, as well as being able to categorise types of freinds: then people would be sharing photos with friends only, or subsets of friends, rather than the whole world/Google crawlers. And of course, educate people about privacy through initiatives like Data Privacy/Protection Day - the 2010 initiative is being supported by Microsoft and European Schoolnet (see European Schoolnet's site for last year.

1 comment:

data protection said...

Nice post!!!
Thanks for the great information on data protection.