3 posts tagged “privacy”

Two months ago my CEO pitched our company to a VC in a Palo Alto coffee shop. As he normally does, he did the demo on his laptop. The VC wanted to compare our product LeapTag (that link is also disclosure), against Google Personalized Search and logged into my CEO's computer to do it.

No one noticed that he never logged out.

Two months later my CEO gets an email from the guy, with a list of searches attached. "Are these your searches?" he asked. In fact they were. Search queries for the past two months - including some from just a few minutes before the guy sent the email. Needless to say, my CEO was horrified and wrote about the experience here.

Yesterday I was talking to him about his intended blog post and I opened up my own personal search history as part of the conversation. I'm not into online porn, or anything else I'd be embarrassed about him seeing, so I felt very comfortable doing this. Ten additional seconds of forethought might have changed that.

What was the first thing at the top of the list? "Threesomes."

Yikes. That was for a tongue-in-cheek post I wrote a while back. Next were a bunch of musicals, Oklahoma, Godspell, The Fantasticks, etc. Then some car stuff, the names of parts BMW said were broken and a search for the price of a new M5 (a girl can dream, right?). Where was all the work stuff?

I'm sure my work searches were there, I was just temporarily blinded by my own sense of embarrassment. Now my boss thinks I'm a musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome. Great. I start to mumble something about how most of these searches are for blog posts and decide that giving away more information is not actually going to help. So I stopped talking.

It's actually amazing how much your personal search history reveals about yourself. And it's all out of context, building a profile of you (esp. if you used Personalized Search)  that you may never see. We think it's private, that as long as we periodically clear the toolbar history the information will be gone.

But it won't.

I think that would make an interesting QOTD: Post your personal search history. Would anybody do it without heavily editing it first? Perhaps. We spend so much time on meme quizzes to provide insight on Who We Are (what Tarot card are you?), posting your history would seems like an interesting next step. Would you do it?

I think we've discovered that this musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome would not.

I love the feature that allows me to set my privacy defaults. I don't love the fact that those defaults apply to every damn thing I put up.

I know, complain, complain, complain.

Here's the thing. I don't want pictures of my kids out on the internet except under very controlled circumstances. Which means only on Vox and mostly to friends and family. And when I moblog, the chances are high that it'll be a picture of my kids doing something cute, so it is nice to be able to post from my phone knowing that the kiddie pics are safe from the freaks.

However, I don't care if the freaks see my books.

And I don't care if they see my music.

Or videos. There are no Pamela/Paris videos to be found around my blog (or house), and even if there were, it's unlikely I would want my friends or (heaven forbid) family to see them. In fact when it comes to this, strangers would be better than friends and family  But I digress.

What I would like, dear Vox, is to be able to set my moblogging defaults separately from my computer posting defaults. Or for even more control, to set my defaults by category (photos one way, videos another).

Can I have that?

Over the weekend I received two e-mails from strangers asking me to invite them to Vox. I had mixed feelings about the solicitations - I was happy that they wanted into Vox, and creeped out that they had contacted me personally to do it. I was unsure about what to do next, what the protocol might be. So I asked my friend, Mr. Etiquette, for some advice. His sage words: if you don't want to invite them you can either ignore them or send them a message declining the request. Believe it or not, it was good to hear that, that I could say no and not feel like a jerk about it. (Thank you Mr. Etiquette.) I sent them each a note saying that I didn't invite strangers, best of luck. etc.

My problem with contact from the strangers was two-fold: first, I didn't particularly mind the idea of inviting them until I realized that they would then be in my network. That sealed the deal for me. I don't want complete and total strangers in my network.

Secondly, I had a problem that my e-mail address was so accessible. I have made it a point to limit my personal information in real life. I don't print my phone number in the phone book, I don't let anyone other than the bank have my kid's social security numbers and I have a number of e-mail addresses for different purposes. I have one special, relatively spam-free (knock on wood) e-mail address that I use for friends and business associates. I only give it out when I want someone to have it. It's the same as my cell phone - I don't print the number anywhere, if you have that number it's because I want you to have it.

I use a different e-mail for shopping and another one for newsletters, strangers, etc. Being contacted at my personal address by strangers unsettled me, and it reminded me that my profile is public and can be seen by anyone. That was one thing in Comet, it is something else in Vox. I immediately changed my e-mail address. I am thinking about hiding it in my profile altogether, but then people might contact me by IM, which I also do not do with strangers, so then I would have to get rid of those too...yes, yes, I have privacy issues. ;-) The thing is, I want my Vox friends to be able to find me. And I want to hide from strangers. Is that wrong?

This internal dilemma sparked an idea: I would love it if there were two versions of my profile: a public version that anyone can see, and that I can control the elements of (like hiding my e-mail address) and a private version visible to friends & family only. This would allow me to be more open with the people I know, and more protective of what I show to strangers.

Would other people be interested in this profile option?

Vox team, would you consider making this option available?