You should always be in control…

February 9, 2012 / posted in Technology, View Point / 4 Comments

Except when we choose not to.

Path should be private

As pointed out by a friend, the above is from Path’s website (From the About page, at the time of writing). Everything on Path is private and you are always in control. Except when the “industry norm” is to steal your data, then everything is justifiable.

I am certain that Path had the best of the intentions when they were doing this, and I strongly believe they were not going to misuse the data. However the problem is that this never crossed their mind, that what they were doing was wrong, irrespective of the industry norms, or developer guidelines. Perhaps its our attitude to build products first, and privacy later? Or perhaps our casualness on the data we share?

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  • http://www.facebook.com/kanwaljit.singh ??????? ????

    So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. 
    The above is from CEO’s post, at the Path blog.

    I ran into same problem, where I wanted to do demographic labelling of twitter data by just looking at user’s profile pic. I was told I will have to take permission from the Department of Research Ethics :)

    • http://isingh.info Inderpreet Singh

      Yes, I saw Dave’s blog. Arrington originally called out for that. As for Twitter, aint those images public domain? I always think everything on twitter = open for the world.

  • Anonymous

    There is always a threat to privacy Even if you write your thoughts on a letter or a notebook, there is a chance that someone can find it and read it.

    The question is how sensitive you are to the data for which privacy is/can be breached.  This is where people need to apply personal judgement before documenting their secrets of life. I dont blame it on technology, its a personal discretion!!

    • http://isingh.info Inderpreet Singh

      Yes, but what I wanted to say was that it is easy to put this out of sight. The information was not leaked, but rather the creators never thought that uploading this information is a breach of privacy in the first place.