Thursday
Jan152009
The Potential of a Portable Social-Media Profile
Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 4:12PM
Are all your profiles up to date? Are you tired of filling out your profile on websites and online applications? Wouldn't it be useful to just maintain one or two central profiles that would automatically update all the others?
The promise of "portable profile" is just that. You can use one profile across the web, and sign into sites without having to fill out all the usual registration stuff.
Of course, this raises major privacy concerns. Each site that you use your portable profile on will have access to your full profile information, as well as possibly knowing what other sites you're registered with.
As a website owner, there are benefits to allowing users to register with their portable profile:
1. You can personalize their experience by knowing more about them,
2. There's a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic.
3. It lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.
There are a number of companies offering portable profile, internet ID, and single sign on services already such as Verisign, OpenID, and my favourite Chi.mp
However, Facebook Connect seem to be leading the way with regards to the promise of taking your network of friends and connections around the web with you. There are, of-course, concerns about whether we should trust a commercial enterprises with our precious identity. Nevertheless, I'll highlight Facebook Connect as the principle is important.
From the Wikipedia page on Facebook Features:
The following presentation illustrates the potential of Facebook Connect, but could just as well apply to Chi.mp if you used that as your hub.
The price of Personalization is Privacy. I don't mind sharing my information if it's going to get me more relevant information and personalized service, but I would expect to be able to control what different people (and sites) can see on my profile. Another concern with single-sign on is the danger of someone getting hold of your one password that opens the doors to your life online. I guess these are the risks we all have to live with. I'd like to get Dominic White's perspective on this.
The promise of "portable profile" is just that. You can use one profile across the web, and sign into sites without having to fill out all the usual registration stuff.
Of course, this raises major privacy concerns. Each site that you use your portable profile on will have access to your full profile information, as well as possibly knowing what other sites you're registered with.
As a website owner, there are benefits to allowing users to register with their portable profile:
1. You can personalize their experience by knowing more about them,
2. There's a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic.
3. It lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.
There are a number of companies offering portable profile, internet ID, and single sign on services already such as Verisign, OpenID, and my favourite Chi.mp
However, Facebook Connect seem to be leading the way with regards to the promise of taking your network of friends and connections around the web with you. There are, of-course, concerns about whether we should trust a commercial enterprises with our precious identity. Nevertheless, I'll highlight Facebook Connect as the principle is important.
From the Wikipedia page on Facebook Features:
Facebook Connect is a single sign-on service that competes with OpenID. The service enables Facebook users to login to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from such sites with their Facebook friends.
The following presentation illustrates the potential of Facebook Connect, but could just as well apply to Chi.mp if you used that as your hub.
Here is Facebook's own list of all the sites that have implemented Facebook Connect (partially only) with a full scale implementation of it at Brainfall.com
The price of Personalization is Privacy. I don't mind sharing my information if it's going to get me more relevant information and personalized service, but I would expect to be able to control what different people (and sites) can see on my profile. Another concern with single-sign on is the danger of someone getting hold of your one password that opens the doors to your life online. I guess these are the risks we all have to live with. I'd like to get Dominic White's perspective on this.
tagged Facebook Connect, identity2.0, open ID Email Article in Digital UBuntu, Facebook, Identity, Opensource, Privacy, Security
Facebook Connect, identity2.0, open ID Email Article in Digital UBuntu, Facebook, Identity, Opensource, Privacy, Security 
Reader Comments (7)
I have to say that I don't have a huge privacy issue...except for my bank details. The issue I have is that STILL, in the age of CRM, the information is not used effectively. The more targeted things get, hopefully the less irrelevant noise I have to deal with. Wishful thinking.
Then again, there's the argument that often consumers don't know what they want until they see it...how much will targeting restrict the acquisition of new users?
Good point Dolce. I'm fully with you on the age of CRM thing!
I don't think targeting will affect the acquisition of new users though - I think that it will stop alienating potential customers by rudely interrupting them, which could be good for business down the line.
I was actually thinking about this today. I like the idea of a single profile, although I would want to control it. Typically the best way to control something is to host it yourself, this is why we all host our own blogs for example. I would like to run my own Singe-Book where it would feed info and interactions to me from the various sites (ala FriendFeed) and any 'universalisable' actions I take are propagated to the sites that support it. For example, if I update my contact details, based on which apps support it, and which I want to see it, my blog and facebook (for example) would be updated but not myspace because of all the creeps. AFAIK this doesn't exist.
I also realise this is not what perspective you were looking for from me.
On the privacy side, I think one of the best defences currently is to make it hard to consolidate all of your information and increasingly importantly, your interactions in one place. I often pick on Google because it's possible and likely for someone to use many of their services, which gives google a very rich picture of you (maps, mail, search, docs etc.). By using different services e.g. hotmail for mail, openstreetmap for maps and scroogle for search I'm only revealing part of the picture (although still a fairly complete one). The danger of a 'hosted' portable profile is that that provider will have a simple computationally feasible method of mining that information to answer fairly complex questions about you such as "are they likely to buy my product" or "how recent was her last pregnancy scare".
However, right now much of my privacy rants are around hypothetical attacks. We aren't seeing a lot of personally identifiable information (PII) being stolen and sold beyond financial data or those supporting the theft of FD (credit card numbers, social security etc.). It's also not something that can be quickly monetised, people with PhDs and large budgets to incentive them to devise ways of mining this info for fun and profit (sound like a large search engine/advertiser we know) need to monetise it. So, we're not likely to see criminals stealing large amounts of facebook friend interactions just yet.
My worry is more long term, the dependence on these services is growing quite quickly; can you live without gmail? And this data hangs around forever, because someone may work out how to monetise some new interaction and double their profits if they can go back 10 years.
In short, Facebook, Facebook Connect, Google and OpenSocial scare me, not now, but because in 10 years that data is likely to still be there and could be used against me or to support attack without my consent. Remember SPAM only required one piece of information to exist, but noone warned of not handing out your e-mail address in the early 90s.
I'm going to be putting together a more cogent and well thought out blog entry on the subject, as I'm hoping to pursue a PhD on the topic of online privacy.
Wow, thanks for this super-interesting and informative response Dom. I think your proposed Phd topic would be extremely well received. Online privacy is becoming one of the hottest topics in marketing and media. Looking forward to learning more about it via your blog!
Not publishing your e-mail address is a kneejerk head-in-the-sand reaction to spam; the real solutions to spam have nothing to do with obfuscating or not publishing e-mail addresses. So, I think this is a red herring; if there's going to be a problem 10 years down the line, there's a problem right now. If you can't identify a problem right now, then any problem 10 years down the line will result from something that comes up 10 years down the line, and be solvable with a solution developed 10 years down the line.
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