LJ, Privacy and How Code Can Help

[green_amber]

One of the reasons why most people I know on LJ, like LJ, is that you can distinguish between your public posts, your Friends posts and your custom posts. I understand most the MySpace type sites, usually aimed at younger audiences, don't support this well; I did find some functions like this when i looked at Facebook but I also understand they were added, not a built in part of the original functionality. And I believe Orkut had a bit of a scandal where they disclosed personal data?

Do any of you use other social spaces that have privacy-control akin to LJ? At one conference, I heard that on Tribe you HAVE to put up a picture of yourself to use it - that's also interesting info (of the opposite kind, natch!)

Getting more geeky, do any of you use a particular search engine, email client, browser, etc. because it gives you more privacy or more control over your personal information? eg does Mozilla /Firefox have advantages over IE in this department? I DON'T really mean general security here - except in the closely defined sense of "stops people bugging/surveilling me".

A quote from Cory to give you the idea..

"If you're a phone company, don't keep logs. …If you're a search company, abandon your cookies. Find the liberty that your competition is too timid to bring to its customers and build it in. And then tell your customers about it: BobNet: the ISP that won't rat you out! PriyaCrawler: a search engine that doesn't log you! Once your customers get wind of the fact that all the features they've dreamt of are possible, cheap, and on offer in the high street, you'll find yourself in a category all your own.”


(Admiss/claimer : yes this is for a paper I'm writing and yes, i could do with the help!! M)

Comments

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

AS I understand it , this is what the whole data retention directive fuss here is about. the telco busines model is scrub logs once bills have gone out and not needed for complaints/q of service checks, ie pretty soon - plus far less logs kept now flat bandwidth in many cases. data retention model wants people to sit on this stuff for months, years, at own expense, so govt can hypothetically ask for it.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Yes, I meant to mention that I am totally in favor of bringing US data retention policy up to the EU standards.

[ripperlyn.livejournal.com]

That seems slightly extreme to me - what about those occasions upon which the telecom fucks up a billing and the person needs to ring back to sort it? It'd be nice if they could keep the data for like, a few weeks past the bill's due date, just to make sure the person wasn't going to need it anyway...