Privacy - why social networks don´t want (you) to know

A lot of social networks are faced with a quandry when setting out their approach to privacy. On the one hand there have been studies that have shown that reassuring people about privacy actually makes them more, not less, concerned (it´s called "privacy salience" and has been demonstrated in a number of experiments). And therefore social networking sites don´t really want to broach the topic openly as they want their users to be comfortable about pouring a lot of personal data into the networks.

But on the other hand, there has recently been a public outcry surrounding privacy. Facebook has had a few high-profile run-ins. So what to do? Well, according to Bruce Schneier, BT´s chief security technology officer, privacy is something that is a competitive feature and something that can be a USP in, what is fast becoming, a very competitive and homogenous market. Whether they do this depends on the need of the individual network to get as much data as possible whilst being open as possible about their privacy controls.

Unlike a lot of businesses involved in social networks, we actually embrace privacy. It´s something we´re always looking to get better at and it´s something that actually underpins the proposition of one of the sites we´ve built recently, most notably for sixpartswater, a site which allows people to send messages (often containing sensitive and personal health information) to different groups of people (each with different privacy settings) in a safe and secure environment. Check it out at https://communities.sixpartswater.org

You can read more about the privacy conondrum here.