Online privacy? Puh! The future probably lies with initiatives like the DataPortability Project

I was amused recently when people expressed surprise that Mark Zuckerberg publicly declared privacy a thing of the past, and wondered if the alleged tell-all by a former Facebook employee was for real. Please, people. How can you possibly expect to share vast amounts of personal data online using shopping sites, Facebook, and cloud services like Google Docs and then expect to maintain any semblence of true privacy? This apparently may be a generational issue, and personally, I find myself bridging the generations on this one. This whole issue was driven home hard for me recently, and here’s how: As part of my work over the past ten years, I’ve experimented casually with forms of social networking going all the way back to the now-defunct GeoCities.com. Although I’ve often consulted with clients to implement the various available tools, I’ve done little to use them myself in a purposeful way; although I’m a very social person, I’m also a very private person. As an example, although I’ve logged into Facebook daily for over a year, I don’t use it as a serious business tool, and don’t very often share serious personal thoughts on issues there. I’ve mostly used it to reconnect with old friends, meet a few new ones, and banter humorously with them. I also only have about 150 friends, because I’m not what what in pop lingo has been called a Facebook Friend Whore. In spite of this, and in spite of not being active on LinkedIn, Xing, or other more business-oriented sites, I have a primary network of about 300 valued contacts, and an extended contact list of maybe 1500 people. So while preparing to launch some new projects this year, I was aware that I’d have to update and verify my contact lists, which I try to do annually. The problem? Like me, you may have noticed (depending on your tech lifestyle) that – because of the pervasive adoption of texting, Skype, and Facebook – your e-mail volume and phone time have dropped off significantly over the past year. A lot of casual connecting – which is the very basis of successful networking – happens on sites like Facebook. Historically, I would maintain most of my contacts in Outlook or Thunderbird, and export this info to Excel to “massage” the data. This became profoundly problematic this year, when I was reminded that Facebook and other sites make it nearly impossible to export your contacts. In fact, they may shut down your account if you use certain tools to do so. So after doing a bunch of research, I ended up doing a manual cut-and-paste of a lot of info, and once again, massaging it in Excel. Why? Because although professional contact management tools like Act!and Goldmine are starting to integrate social networking, they’re not quite there. And the alternative? The soon-to-be-booming market for Social Network Aggregation. Mashable.com lists 20 supposed options here; my personal pick for brand of the year is Profilactic. Yeah. Social networking. Put a sock on it. Next they’ll launch “Profilactate.com, a place where you can get together with friends, and breastfeed“. Seriously though, as of this writing, one of the more viable services of this type is Plaxo which entices you with the ominous tagline “Plaxo-Your address book. For life” (my punctuation). There are others in the works like Neodex or Stronico. The problem? Why on Earth would I spend months or years building a network of valued and categorized contacts, and then *upload them to someone else’s server?!? I’m keeping that data to myself, thank you very much. I think we’ll see this become more of a common concern this year, after the new citizens of the Nation of Facebook realize what they’ve really been doing the last few months, giving little thought to where all their status posts and banter ends up, i.e.: in Google’s index, for all the world to see. There are a couple of initiatives to deal with these issues, like OpenID and The DataPortability Project, but the simple fact is that we’re entering an era with a completely new definition of “privacy”, and you may as well get used to it.