Online All The Time .. Watch Your Back ?

Via Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0

The Coming Privacy Backlash

The “social” media revolution has everyone letting it all hang out all over the “open web,” so it should come as no surprise that the NSA is taking advantage of all this voluntary disclosure of personal information:

“I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.” So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop’s dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Looks like News Corp isn’t the only one to see the data mining potential.

There is a privacy backlash coming that is going to throw cold water on MySpace, Web 2.0, and all the related frothing over anything with the word “social.”

Tags: privacy, invasion, social architecture, resistance, wirearchy

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