I fear my social networks will be data mined
Published 30 July 2007
Bill Thompson is concerned about online public services in a web 2.0 world
If you have visited Multimap lately you will see that the site has had a makeover as dramatic as anything found on daytime television. Gone are the fifties-style maps and the page that reloads every time you zoom in or click an arrow.
In an attempt to compete with Google Maps it has gone all web 2.0 and has been rebuilt from the ground up to offer easier interaction and new features.
Multimap is not alone in looking for that web 2.0 magic. The BBC's websites are being redeveloped as part of the "BBC 2.0" project, and any small technology startup that wants even a modest amount of angel funding is figuring out how to get away with using the term to describe itself.
Yet it isn't at all clear what the term web 2.0 means, and every website or online service that deviates even slightly from the publication of flat, static web pages seems to count. Any page that can be updated in situ qualifies, as do community sites, photo-publishing services and the wide range of visitor-editable pages that have sprung up in the shadow of Wikipedia.
This lack of clarity has been exploited by the marketeers, hucksters and zealots to the point where the term has lost any real significance when it comes to understanding the audience or capabilities of a web-based service.
And it has already led to feverish speculation on the part of more excitable journalists about what "web 3.0" will look like. Even the Web Consortium, the august body that sets the technical standards for the web, has leapt into the fray by claiming that its long-awaited "semantic web" might be the next step, once it figures out what it actually is.
One good reason for the vagueness is that web 2.0 is not about any one technology or way of doing things. It is closer to a political ideology, more a way of thinking about the way sites are used and the services they offer, than a set of programming guidelines.
The adherents of the web 2.0 model of the world are now in control, establishing a hegemony in which it is hard to imagine (let alone build) a website that does not provide user engagement and interaction or allow for rich interlinking and redistribution of content.
Sites like Facebook pull in pictures from Flickr, link to movies on YouTube and let users "twitter" about daily life, while static sites, full of words and pictures with no space for comment or feedback, no interactive widgets pulling in news feeds or latest photos or calendars, are not merely old-fashioned, they are rapidly becoming unthinkable.
Tragically, the one place where the traditional approach is not only thinkable but, apparently, deemed compulsory is in the public sector.
Government departments may experiment with interactive sites for paying taxes or acquiring licences and local authorities are doing more to engage local people, but their sites tend to be static and self-contained, some way from the new world of cross-connected and interlinked sites and services.
One obvious solution would be for the public sector to build on the successful sites that are already out there and follow cabinet ministers onto Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. After all, these privately owned and run services have a proven track record in attracting users; they are innovative and easy to use, and they are often free.
The problem is that they are, and remain, private space. MySpace's terms and conditions give it the right to reuse material posted there for its own commercial purposes, and the restrictions on what can be said or done are those of a market-sensitive publisher, rather than a state committed to the defence of freedom of expression.
If Facebook decides to terminate your account, you have no right of appeal or judicial review and, when it is sold to Google, Yahoo! or News Corporation, all of your carefully documented social networks and political affiliations will be available for data mining and other forms of exploitation.
We have all experienced the loss of public amenity that comes when shopping malls are handed over to private developers who then impose their own conditions on what used to be a public high street. The danger of using the new generation of online services to deliver public goods is that the real value will always accrue to the site owner and their own interests will always come first.
Public sector investment in technology is fraught with danger, but the new web 2.0 companies have largely grown organically by building a relatively low-cost solution and growing it, funding growth from revenue. We even have a model, in the social charity MySociety, for how socially useful services can be built cheaply but in a way that makes them scalable or easy to duplicate.
Relying on the private sector for our websites will not do. It is time to think about network Keynesianism, investing in interactive public sector online services, which embody democratic principles and remain under the control of local or national government.
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