Once upon a time if you were in a crowd you could be anonymous. Not so on cldwrld. The danger is in thinking because there are a lot of people using a particular Cloud-based application like Facebook or Gmail you can hide in the crowd. This is not so.

Behind all these Cloud-based applications lie companies providing them who have complete access to all user records, whether it be 350 million in the case of Facebook or 270 thousand (bloggers) at WordPress.com.

Through them a spotlight can be shined on anyone in the crowd. It can be turned on by a company for a number of reasons.

One of them is marketing. In the case of Facebook this generates a tension between its wish to make money from its enormous user database (over 300 million and growing) by marketing an individual’s personal data and that individual’s privacy (although I have suggested an alternative to the marketing route in my last post but one).

Another is to make sure an individual complies with the Terms of Service (the laws of the digital country), which may be changed at any time.

But there are at least a couple of ways that the spotlight can be turned on improperly. Either someone can break into the company’s records and quickly access an individual account (which may have happened at Google this week, although their response has been, as Nicholas Kristof has said, breathtaking) or people at the company itself can use the data on a single person improperly.

In this last case – who will Guard the Guardians? Are we going to leave it to Real World organizations to respond to improper actions against individuals case by case? Whatever those actions are?

I think it would be useful to come at it from the other angle. In this case owners of large Cloud-based applications used by people using their real identities (Digital Inhabitants) would create their own “spotlight” panel. It would be created specifically by the Cloud-based computing industry. It would work on putting together an industry plan to protect people from the “spotlight in the crowd” effect across the entire industry.

This would include industry wide technical security standards, standard procedures to guard against employee information leaks and standard procedures for having changes in the TOS vetted.

At the moment, it seems to me, we rely on ad hoc solutions by individual companies and I am not sure that’s the right approach.

—-

Haiti: For a link  to charitable organizations operating in Haiti and some recommendations please see this page. And see this post on my personal blog for a note on the different responses from China and Digicel (a cell-phone company operating in the area).