First, I like your “Soylent Green” reference. Nice touch.

Second, I still tend to disagree with you on people not being duped. While it’s true that consumers give out personal information without much thought to the cost, the reason why consumers have such a limited knowledge of how their personal information is used on the WWW is because companies keep those disclosures in the fine print. If the majority of consumers even had an inkling of what companies do with their information (such as farming out their e-mail addresses to “spam lists”) they would think twice about giving it out.

And beyond that, most companies aren’t being good stewards of the information and you’re right, they do need to be held to a higher standard. I think there should be more consumer education about the consequences of giving out personal information on the Web, and in addition, I think companies need to be far more transparent about their intentions for and planned usage of private information.

Anyway, I think we’ve hit something of a bunny trail here, but I’m enjoying this discussion. I have no doubt that consumer privacy issues will only increase in importance as a hot button topic.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

The thing is, people aren’t being duped. People are willingly sharing information without thinking about the security costs. Companies who handle this information should be held to certain standards to ensure personal data doesn’t get stolen. Marketers/Platforms must also provide a transparent system informing consumers of the process and how their info is being used.

PS: The post’s headline and one of the pictures reference Charlton Heston’s dystopian film “Soylent Green.”

I see the social graph becoming a valued commodity that companies should continue to keep in a “walled garden.” Otherwise, the temptation for advertisers to abuse the social graph will be too great. I don’t want my personal information being indexed for anyone to use or misuse. So far many of these initiatives strike me as part big brother, part greedy advertiser. What’s the value proposition for consumers to make this data available? It’s definitely not as valuable to consumers as it is for advertisers.

OpenID (which is a future concept of cross-platform profile info or the ability to export from one social network to the next) is more of the profile data, etc. OpenSocial, however, allows the developers to harvest the social graph information available on each social network. So let’s say you have Food Fight on your MySpace and on your LinkedIn: the developer gets all that social graph data from both of those profiles. Does that make sense? At least, that’s how I have come to understand it.

As I understand it, Open Social isn’t so much for me to share my interests, relationships, etc. among the Facebooks and Nings of the world but more for developers to create applications that work on all of those sites. It’s a start, but it’s not quite the same as having my profile data, friends, presence info, etc. shared universally.