hasan elahi Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

Hmmmm

Facebook greeted users today with a message stating that in one month’s time, profiles will be listed on search engines such as Google. The listing will only include your name and profile picture, in a move that obviously going to encourage any non-users to sign up if they find you in a result and want to contact you or find out more about you.
You can remove yourself by changing your privacy settings, hence the one month warning.

Even with growing concerns over the amount of information social networks can reveal about an individual, it’s unlikely to harm Facebook. Although it’s another step away from the friendly little college network origin, it’s going to drive further registrations, and continue the growth of Facebook as the most popular social networking site.

But it’ll be interesting to see whether a backlash begins. And whether more people begin to publicise and worry about companies like Rapleaf, Upscoop and Trustfuse, which are all owned by the same parent Rapleaf company. Find out why any social network user should know about these companies, at ZDnet, here.

It’s rapidly coming down to a choice between keeping everything you do offline to ensure your privacy, or accepting that everything you ever do will appear online, like Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience response.

I picked up an old-fashioned print copy of Wired the other day when I was at Stansted Airport. I quite enjoy reading about web topics in print, mainly because it gives my eyes a rest from the glow of the VDU. Strangely though, I find the American style of breaking up articles into two section, as Wired does, to really detract from the experience.

Anyway, one article caught my attention, in the current climate of internet ids and convergence between online personas and offline identities. Hasan Elahi was detained by the FBI after stepping off a U.S. flight due to suspicions he was a terrorist. Luckily, he’s actually a Rutgers professor and artist, but it led to a web-based project for him.

On TrackingTransience.net, Hasan details everything he does, and everywhere he goes. Meals, purchases, flights, it’s all there. And it allows him the perfect alibi, should anyone question his whereabouts and motives. And funnily enough, his server log shows hits from the Pentagon and the Secretary of Defense among others.

He predicts a day when so many people are posting so much online it puts Big Brother out of business.

it’s an interesting idea. Particularly when there is such a threat of identity theft and fraud online. But if your bank can see you’re in the newsagents in Cambridge when your card is being used online from a PC in New York, or in person in Manchester, it’ll make innocence easier to prove – if banks etc accept the evidence, which will take time for them to grasp the concept.

The only flaw is that it requires you to be absolutely honest. And that’s the case with all this convergence. If you’re in a relationship, for example, and you get approached by someone online who flirts, having all your info in one place could lead to huge problems. If you record anything that has broken any rules, then you’ve invited yourself to be caught. And what happens if you’re an attractive 17 year old girl rather than a 35-year-old male, and you try the same technique?

There will always be risks to every decision, and there will always be flaws. But Hasan has shown that rather than worrying about having your privacy invaded and spending your life paranoid and trying to cloak yourself, perhaps it’s more effective to just put everything on show and take what comes.