Ashwin’s musings on technology, music and just about anything else…
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Looks like there are folks getting things done in the privacy space, especially with regards to standardizing privacy policies, something that I think would be a great enabler for business on the Net. My 2c: better, and more easily, informed consumers are happier consumers.
Around the time I put up my first post on privacy, I started noticing conversation on the topic in the blogosphere. Oddly enough, I had started writing that post before I noticed the attention that was being paid to the issue.
After I read Jon Udell writing on the politics of data control, I was absolutely certain something was in the air; how could I possibly anticipate information flows on the Net? Of course, there had to be an explanation, so I settled for the most obvious one - we are approaching the boundaries of the Singularity, that remarkable union of the collective human consciousness and the mass of information and processing power that is the Internet.
Then again, there is all that beer to be considered… and Technorati stats. Did you know that they provide a very cool embeddable trends graph?
With that, we return to our regular scheduled programming. Have a great weekend, folks!
Via James Governor, Kevin Murphy says that privacy policies should have RSS feeds.
Haig reminds us on James’ blog of the P3P (Personal Privacy Preferences) standard, though James seems to think that there’s no way we’ll ever be able to agree to standards for machine-readable privacy policies.
I don’t know about that - surely something akin to the Creative Commons licenses could be created for privacy policies? A common set of policies could be created in plain text, legalese and P3P, so that all consituencies, human, lawyer and machine, could be served equally. Assuming that these policies were capable of covering the privacy policies for most websites, they might find their way into general use, just as the Creative Commons licenses have.
So eBay’s partnered with Google to provide Google adwords results for the non-US market; eBay has exactly the same deal with Yahoo for the domestic US market. Odd moves indeed, but definitely safe ones for eBay.
The business behind the partnership is obviously sound; as the Search Engine Journal notes, Google has a greater search engine market share outside the US, which eBay is moving to capitalize on.
However, what worries me (a vague, insubstantial ghost of a worry for the moment), is what happens to our user data. Does eBay really share just search keywords with Yahoo/Google? Or does more user data get moved around? eBay’s privacy policy indicates that personal information may be shared with “members of our corporate family to help detect and prevent potentially illegal acts and provide joint services; (Our corporate affiliates will market only to users who request these services.)”. What exactly that means with regards to the partnerships with Yahoogle (pardon my French) remains unclear - does redirection of user-provided search keywords qualify as a “joint service”? Will users get to opt in to this service (we don’t seem to right now)?
