Online privacy, a battle that can't be won?

The party I went to at the weekend was interesting from a sociological point of view. Inevitably when at these kinds of things, I spent some time people watching and part of that was spent observing their mobile habits. Everyone had phones, even a lot of the children

The good thing was that people didn't seem to be using them too obviously and conversation was the order of the evening. There was a seated area outside the main room and that seemed to end up being the 'taking a break from the party and checking my phone' space. Every time I walked past, there were 2 or 3 people checking their phones. It was interesting that these people had chosen to step away from the party in order to do that. Is that a new social etiquette? I did it too. I stepped outside for a few minutes to call my Mum although I didn't succumb to browsing my social feeds for once.

The other habit worth noting was the lack of people taking photographs. Hardly anyone took any photos with their phone at all. I didn't take any either. I think much of that was down to the types of people who were there. They were mostly parents of children under 12. As such, I think they will have had so many letters from headteachers about not taking photographs at school events that they've stopped taking photos when children are around for fear of inadvertently taking a photo of a child without permission. I missed a cracker of a shot of a group of the children with their backs to me at the bar. I was very close to taking the picture but because they were all under 10, and even though you couldn't see their faces, I kept my phone in my bag and didn't take the picture.

I think it's right to be mindful of other people's privacy and I do try to do that but it's not always easy. But sometimes the big companies we use daily make that hard. Their growth hacking often relies on us sharing our lists of contacts with them so that services like Facebook and LinkedIn can join the dots to connect us with people we know. I, like many others, have learned the hard way, not to do that. Most of us have clicked something that triggered or nearly triggered a mass email to all the contacts on our address book.

I thought I'd turned off all of those contact book sync settings in the apps and online services I use. However, on checking, I did find some very old contacts on my Facebook sync which I have since removed. I was prompted to do this following a post from Techhub's Elizabeth Varley. Here are the instructions to check yourself.

Did you ever upload your phone contacts to Facebook? Can't remember and want to check? You may want to delete them all. You can find out if you've uploaded contacts here: https://m.facebook.com/invite/history/ .

None of this will delete any of your contacts as being Facebook friends, don't worry.
If you're doing this on desktop, use https://www.facebook.com/invite_history.php. 

Make sure to click on the messenger contacts too and delete those. I didn't think I'd uploaded any to Facebook, but had clearly slipped up ages ago and didn't realise some old contacts were still lurking there.

These uploaded contacts are one of the ways that Facebook does the "people you may know" thing.
If you're wondering why this might be an issue, here's a very good article about how Facebook uses data to figure out everyone you've ever met.

I don't know if we'll ever win the battle for online privacy. We can but try.

Day 19/30 NaBloPoMo (yes, I'm still behind but aim to catch up today!)

Big growth predicted for Mobile Social Networking

eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012. As you can see from the image below, the millions of subscribers are a small percentage seeing as we've already hit 3 billion subscribers globally. But the potential for growth is clear. And early findings suggest a strong customer demand for mobile social networks. This doesn't surprise me in the least as mobile is all about *communication* and *community* and social networks fulfil both those needs so tying in with mobile makes perfect sense.


As discussed at the recent Mobile Youth Workout, we already know that mobile social networking is driving data usage on mobile. Typically, Japanese youth are spending 2 hours a day on the mobile internet - largely for social networking (on sites like Mixi). And with the general growth of facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter et al, including a big chunk of that on mobile, this growth doesn't seem far-fetched.

"For example, MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace
Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. "It wasn't until we rolled out
m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones," Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for
MySpace, told eMarketer.

Facebook claimed 4 million unique registrations. Mobile-only social networking players such as airG, Mocospace, myGamma and itsmy.com all reported several million users soon after launch."

And there are more mobile socnets than that - Peperonity with over half a million home pages representing a fraction of its customer base, and Mxit immediately spring to mind, not to mention Cyworld (SK Telecom-owned and now available in the US as well as Asia) and Mobikade and Trutap in the UK.

If mobile social networking is your bag, or where you think your bag should be, then emarketer's new (paid for) report on the topic may well be worth a read.

Tuesday Tasters

In no particular order:

India's primary web connection is via mobile not PC

Vodafone is linking up with DatingDirect to offer mobile dating. I thought they must have already been doing mobile dating, but clearly not. And by the sounds of it DatingDirect is having troubles of its own if you read the comments on the link above so I wonder if Vodafone has chosen the right partner. Hmm. Elsewhere, Mobestar has teamed up with Bone Fish to offer mobile dating using its mDate service.

Mig33 is doing exceptionally well with 400 million customers in 200 countries for its mobile messaging service. "Simply download the application onto your mobile phone, and you’ll be connected to everyone around the world through the most popular online services. So you can IM, visit chat rooms, send email, share photos, SMS and, of course, make cheap calls—all from your mobile phone." More info at Mig33's website. Of course, they also have 10m dollars in the bank, so that's going to help get the service out there.

Meanwhile, MVNO Amp'd is shutting up shop leaving thousands of customers network-less. Customer services stopped yesterday and the service will shut down completely at the end of the month.

Incentivated is ramping up its recruitment.

Skandia Cowes Week is using SMS for research purposes. A series of short questions relating to that day's sailing will be sent via text message to each of the competitors. Questions will be asked on numerous topics, including the quality or difficulty of the course, the accuracy of the weather forecasts and the standard of stewarding.

And finally, young Britons prefer meeting face to face than using digital methods. Get away! You mean young people prefer going out socialising, going to gigs, dancing the night away, chillin' at a festival and hanging with their mates than spending time in front of a computer screen. Well I'm not sure I actually needed a research paper to tell me that. But there are some other findings that you might find interesting in there.

some thoughts on social media

As lots of my friends will tell you, I'm quite a sociable creature and I enjoy more than my fair share of on- and off-line networking. Well, it seems that this online social networking lark is actually a good thing. Yes, I know twittering can seem like it's a complete waste of time and you can easily get lost in facebook for hours at a time and end up getting no work done (guilty as charged m'lud) but Clive Thompson discusses how Twitter can help you develop a Social Sixth Sense over at Wired Magazine. It's a good article and I agree with Clive's findings.

In fact, Deirdre, Lori Faye and I were only discussing last night about different industries and how suppliers get chosen and a lot of it, historically, is down to personal relationships and that if you're not in London, it was very likely you'd miss out on opportunities - we were talking about TV production in particular. And I wasn't terribly surprised at that conclusion. Ultimately, people buy people, all other things being more or less equal.

But of course, before we were all online or had mobile phones, those personal relationships meant being in the same physical location and meant nights out, lunches and morning coffees with your clients. And if you weren't in the same town, then it was very unlikely you'd ever bump into them serendipitously in a bar or event. So it often meant you lost out because you weren't top of mind with the client so someone else gets the gig.

I believe online social media is helping to change that. Yes, business is still about relationships, but you can have relationships with people via the internet (messaging, email, blogs, communities, forums etc). It means you can manage more simultaneous relationships than ever before (thus increasing your chances of stuff happening). And you can serendipitously 'bump' into someone somewhere like facebook (you're in the same random group for example or have a mutual friend) and a lot of this is happening not by being in the same physical location but by being in the same *virtual* location. And this certainly seems to be the case for me. Lots of people feel they 'know' me because they read my blog or they read my facebook or twitter updates or see a videocast or listen to a podcast of me or look at my pictures on flickr. And I certainly do generate work on the back of this visibility.

But there lies a deeper issue. Once you put yourself out there online, it's always there so you have to be prepared that absolutely *anyone*, in theory, can access your stuff (leaving the identity theft issue to one side). This means that the divide between work and personal life is much more blurred than ever before because the internet is 24/7. Gone, or at least, going are the days when you were one person between the hours of 9am to 6pm at Acme Inc and then as soon as you got home you become someone else. The way I see it, this is all my life and I'm just going to be me. It's just too hard to pretend to be someone else for 9 hours a day as well as doing the job. Believe me, I tried it early on in my career and it was exhausting and emotionally draining. And I had many a heated discussion with a male work colleague who was more than happy to compartmentalise his life. I've never been very good at that.

But what happens to all those folks who say work in a boring office and push paper around for a government organisation or financial firm? The workers who only do the job because it pays the bills. The individuals who actually hate their job. And maybe the ones who don't have honed social skills in real life, let alone a virtual life. The ones for whom the thought of anyone at work knowing *anything* about their private life is abhorrent. I've heard tell of women who don't tell anyone they work with whether or not they're married, have children, or even which area of town they live. I can't imagine being like that, but I'm quite sure there are plenty people out there who just want to remain very very private. How is that going to work going forward? And how much will that matter? Does this mean the digital divide will get bigger?

Will there be a time when it's no longer possible to have a very separate work and home life in our mobile/web ten point seven and a half world? Will the prospect of privacy become irrelevant as the myspace generation start to do the jobs we're doing now? And what happens when they start to become MPs or judges or doctors and all those pictures emerge of them dancing the night away, scantily clad in a bikini and clearly being stimulated by more than coca cola? Will we care, does it matter, and does it affect your ability to do your job? And will it mean the tabloids can no longer have their fun exposing folks as it's all out there anyway?

And if that's not enough to worry about, some employers are claiming ownership of their employee content if it was created during working hours. Another good reason never to have a proper job again. I have absolutely no wish to hand over all my contacts details willy nilly to any employer. And where does the data protection act sit on this one anyway? Hmm.

I don't have the answers, maybe there aren't any and we'll just have to wait and see what happens but these are questions I often ponder about.

What do you think?

How to build a brand through Social Networks

Online social networks and social media are something I play around with routinely - as a way to keep up with friends but also to keep an eye on web 2.0 and digital trends that may or may not be relevant to what I do or what my clients do.

Case in point being this blog.. I started it as an experiment to see what the 'blogging' phenomenon was all about and the best way to work it out was to start a blog myself. And here I am 383 posts and more than 2 years later still blogging away so it turned into a bit more than an experiment. Some key benefits for me have been creating my own archive of thoughts, links and stories which goes one step further than Delicious, taking part in online conversations about things mobile with other bloggers around the world and in generating business as it's a very visible resume.

But what about b2c online social networks - the likes of facebook, myspace, bebo, librarything et al? We're still making up the business models as the future is unclear, although Moblog UK seems to be doing a pretty good job around the sponsorship model.

As with anything 'social', on or offline, people move around according to where their friends hang out - whether it's a website, a bar or a nightclub. So if you want to learn more about social media and what it means in the commercial world, I have 3 tips for you..

1. Read mashable - it's a great blog covering all aspects of online social networking and is a great read (you can even get the feeds via twitter)

2. Have a read of this particular post of 'how to build a brand through social networks' from the mashable guys

3. Join Lloyd's London Social Media club which meets every Thursday in Central London where you get to do and talk about social media. And no, you don't have to be a geek to attend. Just like you don't have to be a geek to have a page on facebook.