Line of Business
Hey, that's my data!
Why we're all on Facebook, whether we like it or not8/1/2007 6:00:00 AM By: Shane Schick
So there I was, lounging around on a cruise ship that was touring around the Toronto Islands and minding my own business, when the cameras started going off. This was our company's summer function, and a few of my coworkers decided to record the event for posterity. That's when I realized how dangerous Web 2.0 could be.
There have always been people who enjoy taking snapshots at parties, but the worst that could happen is they might get passed around the office the next day. More likely they'd stay stuffed inside an envelope collecting dust. Not so with Facebook: the morning following our little lakeside excursion, my colleague had the entire set of photos up on his page, with my clued-out expressions exposed for the world to see. I don't mind, of course, but suddenly I remembered the ugly picture of me my brother has on his Facebook page. Or the picture one of my best friends took when I was dog-tired and posted on her page. Suddenly, without ever signing up for this service, I feel like I'm all over it.
This is what happens to data in an age of social networking. We don't necessarily create the content, we don't store the content, and we have little to no control over how it is managed, distributed or manipulated. At the moment, if all you knew about me was the stuff about me you found on Facebook you'd assume I was a haggard-looking ne'er do well who spent too much time boating and not enough time sleeping. Which might be true, but it's not the entire truth.
We've already seen how cell phones have managed to turn people who wouldn't have known which end of a camera was which into digital paparazzi. Now we're starting to see everyday consumers turned into the tabloid media that publishes scandalous pictures. The problem this poses for enterprises is that business data will inevitably wind up on these services, and not necessarily by the people responsible for that data. It could be the people who decide to publish photos from a business event, or blog about a relationship with one of their clients. The capture and exposure of this kind of information is becoming much easier to do and requires less and less permission from the other parties involved.
The tendency has been to focus on the privacy and security of the users of Web 2.0 services. Few have begun to address the issues facing the innocent bystanders – what kind of rights and protection they should have. It's not a very well-defined category yet, but I'm willing to predict that one of the fastest-growing areas in the software market next year will be for any products that assist with the monitoring of company citations or information across Web 2.0 services.
Symantec, for example, is releasing a product this week called Dark Vision that tracks what information is being illegally bought and sold on underground Web sites. The future will be focused on creating watchdogs for much more innocuous sites that we log on to every day. Don't even think about opting out. If you're alive and walking through the world today, you're already feeding the Web 2.0 machine. It will become increasingly imperative we all do more to find out how we're being digested.