Privacy issues related to the usage of the FIDIS Ning Platform

[FIDIS NOE]

Lothar Fritsch in his profile (20 nov 2008) raised a number of issues related to the privacy issues of using Ning as a platform for 'Networking'. After all, we are disclosing a lot of personal information that will be stored somewhere in the US or in some other places.
Please use this discussion space to share your thoughts on this subject.

[Lothar Fritsch]

I'd like to point out two papers related to this discussion. The first one hints at a good reason why we use this platform:

T. Vila, R. Greenstadt and D. Molnar, Why We Can't Be Bothered to Read Private Policies - Models of Privacy Economics as a Lemons Market, 2nd Annual Workshop 'Economics and Information Security'; University of Maryland, May 2003, 2003,.

The second paper is a very useful reading concerning the interpretation of privacy policies. The world will not be the same for you after you read this paper ;-)

A. I. Antón, J. B. Earp and A. Reese, "Analyzing Website Privacy Requirements Using a Privacy Goal Taxonomy," in Proceedings of the IEEE Joint International Requirements Engineering Conference 2002, IEEE Computer Society, Ed. Essen: IEEE Computer Society, 2002, pp. 605-612.

In this paper, the authors divide policy clauses into PRIVACY PROTECTION and PRIVACY VULNERABILITY GOALS. They analyze privacy policies and categorize their content according to the identified goals. The authors show that most policies are actually in favor of vulnerability goals.

Ning clearly favors vulnerability goals in its policy.

[Thierry Nabeth]

On a related subject, I wanted to mention that LinkedIn has recently (14 November 2008) updated its privacy policy and user aggrement.

see:
LinkedIn Privacy Policy
LinkedIn User Agreement