You wake up in Austin. You check into brightkite. You wake up in San Francisco. You check into brightkite.
Now that being social means plotting your location, the issue of oversharing is top of mind again.
It’s not the idea of fellow geeks knowing where I’m at any given time that makes me uncomfortable. I have no problem with brightkite, and I love the idea of you knowing when I’m in ur town so long as I’ve authorized you.
But I check in to public timelines as well. And in those cases, anyone can see where I’m at. As a single person, the concern wouldn’t even occur to me. But family changes this, and lately I’m wondering how much to reveal. (Like whether I’m out of town.)
To put a finer point on it, I’m wondering how much to reveal on Twitter since it’s the one communication app I use that doesn’t allow privacy differentiation within a stream.
I understand Twitter has immediate issues to deal with, but privacy should be high on the list of concerns. Right now it’s not being handled with any amount of sophistication.
I don’t mean to complain about Twitter. The issue is more mine than theirs. And, fwiw, I love the service.
There’s a simple solution, though. Allow members to post private tweets by preceding them with a p. e.g., p You wake up in Vegas.
Those private tweets would only be seen by the people you trust most. I know that everyone follows and follows back to widely varying degrees, but, for anyone using the service, the segment of friends you trust most would be reciprocal followers (i.e., those you follow who also follow you back.)
I have about 150 friends in this category. And even though I don’t really know them all well, I’d trust them to know that I’m out of town or where I’m staying or, maybe, what my family is up to.
I think we got caught up in the excitement of lifestreaming and forgot to really think about who might be following those streams. Maybe some of those people are crazies.
7 Responses to “Talking to strangers”
It seems to only make headlines when the right person gets killed. Interesting to ponder - what you reveal in a tweet actually reveals what you did not consider as well…i.e I am in Austin, also means you are not home.
My wife and I just had the conversation tonight on how easy it is to now find out if your sig other is cheating. Why, cellphones…you can infer the obvious, but also disect the unobvious. Your partners bills shows 244 txt msgs, you check his phone daily and the history is gone? Who deletes history daily - oh smarty, you just got busted with indirect proof.
Agreed.
Hey Greg. I added a “(Like whether I’m out of town.)” to make the point more clear - that’s exactly what concerns me. It feels strange to announce your absence. More so when some of your family is at home.
Even in blogging, this is difficult on whether to announce your absence. Many times, I’d like to talk about an upcoming vacation or conference…but wonder about those watching the blog that I prefer not to watch the blog. Often, I have taken the safer road and only announced my presence at a conference or “fun trip” after the event.
My wife calls me paranoid, I call myself a “realist”.
Sounds familiar Bryan. Twitter is funny, though - the chatter is very immediate (I very rarely tweet about future events and never about past), and I find myself dropping all kinds of clues I’d never blog.
Yep. My solution was to set up two Twitter accounts, one public and one private (see http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/01/21/the-twitters/). Perhaps appropriately for the context, that solution doesn’t scale very well.
I’ve kicked that around, too. At some point, though, it’s probably easier to just go back to group txt messaging for the double secret stuff.