Owl Content

Den aktuellen Buzz um die bevorstehende Veröffentlichung von Googles OpenSocial “Standard” für das Austauschen von Daten über verschiedene Vernetzungs-Plattformen hinweg habe ich zum Anlass genommen, endlich ein paar Gedanken aufzuschreiben, die mir dazu schon länger durch den Kopf gingen und die bisher unterbelichtet sind:

The real issues do not lie in the individual users giving consent to the platforms they use to share (some of) their data with the outside world. The real issue is: If this data is about social relations - friends, colleagues, contacts etc. - everybody of their friends would have to agree to have the information shared, as it is also about them.  (…)

Professional networks are built at LinkedIn or Xing, party and music related networking happens at MySpace, and students connect to each other at StudiVZ. While most of the information in these platforms may not be secret or sensitive, there is a reason people do different things on different platforms. I mean, when I go out for a beer with my friends, I also dress in a different way from a professional conference. Nothing is secret about this, but we play different roles in different contextes, and the kind of relations we build or the ways we express ourselves are different. This is in fact a good thing for society, because it allows functional differentiation and thereby more complex societies than people used to be able to develop when everbody lived in small villages. This goes against the “moral argument” for open social networking data exchange and the assumption that openness is always good.