- Image via Wikipedia
These days, one of the greatest threats to privacy is the fact that people don’t expect to have it. Site users provide personal information in great detail, and they fully expect that their phone is going to automatically download the photographs of new friends from online without asking anyone’s permission for it.
There are a number of users that are extremely vulnerable to privacy threats and eventually identity theft. Those who are necessarily the most tech savvy enjoy the use of social networking to keep in touch with family and friends. For instance, citizens in nursing homes have very little of their own pride and strength left to write letters or talk on the phone, social networking provides them with everything they need on one site. However, are they protecting their identity enough to make themselves not vulnerable to losing what little they have left.
For the most part, the erosion of privacy has gone at a steady, if slightly bemoaned pace. A series of privacy changes on Facebook earlier this year may have changed that, at least for a few users, because the controversy has caused a lot of people to put serious thought into their social networking privacy options on the internet. Unsurprisingly, some of those people don’t like their options; this is where the Diaspora project comes in.
Diaspora is planned to be a privacy-sensitive alternative to facebook. As observant people have been noticing for awhile now, you can have most of what facebook offers from other sites. The convenience of facebook is that it offers all the features in a central location. Diaspora is intended to offer that same convenience, without even the privacy risk of storing people’s information on a centralized server; the Diaspora concept is a distributed network. It could aggregate information from a number of sites to facilitate social networking. Photo hosting, tweets, blogs, and even facebook profiles(if people wanted to use both services at once) could be accessed conveniently from a single feed, much like a facebook friend feed.
The project was started by a team of privacy-concerned college students, who then used the site Kickstarter.com to raise capital for the project. The first code is scheduled for release in October 2010, and it will be impressive if they can create the software they’re intending to create within that time frame; information portability between widely diverse applications is really problematic to implement. Until then, those of us concerned with privacy and personal information security will just have to wait.