Online Personas

All this social web, online identity and personalization has been bugging me for ages and although I do agree web should improve in that vector, I mainly disagree with most approaches. I do wonder not only on implementation aspects (decentralized, security, etc, etc....) but also on other aspects such as unaware behaviours it can build on individuals.

On this post I try to organize my thoughts by writing about it!

Intro - Social is built on top of individuals

Social is about allowing interactions to happen between individuals. That interaction has always been a motivation factor for networking (chatting, gaming, forums, etc...) and in some sense it has always been present in online worlds. The current need is not on creating more social tools but actually to expand and unify and the concept and identification of individuals such that the social experiences can be improved across the web.

Identity without losing privacy

Developing a form of identity is crucial for the social effectiveness: if others want to interact with me, then they need to be able to identify me. However I am not willing to lose my privacy such that any third-party can track and profile me. Additionally note that most of the times users browse the internet or interact with services there is no concrete need to identify the user (especially identification in real world). In several cases the user might want to be unidentifiable/anonymous in order to not lose the freedom to keep their choices privates.

There has been several fights on history for freedom that it would be a shame if internet got locked up removing freedom from the users. We all need the tools to be allowed to learn and explore without the fear for repercussion or control by others.

Personalization

Personalized services are indeed a great plus and the extent of using machines to help human dealing with information. However I greatly disagree with approaches where users have to give up privacy in order to enjoy personalization: I am not a fan of targeted advertisement in the sense I get tracked and profile by some party to exploit my desires and needs, but I am all in favour in using a machine on my side to filter and sort out all advertisements that can potentially be interesting to me.

Not only that, but I also do not feel comfortable on letting others decide on what I should or should not see, I do not feel comfortable on letting others model and reshape the world based on what they think it's better for me. In short I defend the personalization role to be given to the user to avoid each one to live on bubble controlled by others (TED talk: online filter bubbles).

Control over shared information

Information shared with one does not necessarily extends with others individuals groups/friends. Individuals should be aware of that and should not automatically pass information between each others as that breaks trustiness between them. In this sense information and interaction should be treated as private by default unless explicit information has been given to make it spread. Note that I do not defend enforcing of controlling information sharing, just that control should be in place so it does not happens without intention.

I believe this to be a necessary step to allow an individual to experiment multiple social-masks. That freedom is a basic need to develop ones character and to serve as safe-mechanism to personal and social development.

Summary

Ultimately the web besides a database of knowledge and information (that should be accessible to all of us without control) is also a medium over which individuals interact. As I see it, attempts to control and enforce specific rules and definitions on the interaction between individuals (enforcing identification, controlling and filtering available information, etc...) should be considered as failures of the medium as they restrict the freedom of the individuals.