Privacy vs. weblogs.

As people are creating webs of links between weblogs and establish common-interest communities, what are the consequences for privacy?

Preserving privacy means preserving the ability to own and control all of the personal information. It also means the ability to clearly understand what kind of personal information is being produced. From the first look at the issue, it would appear that we disclose exactly what we decide to post to weblog and not more. But as people begin to be part of weblog communities, another kind of personal information is being released. It becomes possible to determine the circle of friends for instance. It becomes possible to track patters behind individual's interests over time; to determine the level of interest of others to a given individual; to tell who's reading.

There's key difference between weblogs and newsgroups where most of the above bits of personal information was already in the public domain.  With weblogs you can reliably answer the question Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are. Also, with weblogs it is much easier to build analysis tools.

Let's imagine for a second that some guy Joe is an recovering alcoholic. Joe is not talking about this particular problem of his on the weblog. He want to keep this fact private. Now, Joe has friends whom he met in rehabilitation clinic. They choose to disclose the fact that they are recovering alcoholics. Once it a while Joe's friends link to Joe's weblog. Now imagine a tool that tracks links between weblogs over time and achieves statistically representative data sample. When it becomes clear that 10 of his friends have problems with alcohol, will Joe be able to keep his secret for long??? What if Joe decides to run for president?

I'm not trying to be comprehensive here and I'm sure anyone can cook-up another technology-assisted privacy invasive scheme. My point is, many people are not realizing what kind of personal information is really being released as we continue to build these webs of weblogs. Maybe its too early to ring a bell, but weblog tool vendors should definitely think about this (or talk to experts). It is very important to realize they are developing tools that create wealth of personal information and it should be their responsibility to allow users to own and control all of the personal information.