In a press release, Teambox said that private elements “allows users to conduct private conversations within a project that can be restricted to certain individuals. This new functionality is ideal for internal teams that want to bring outside vendors into Teambox for project and task management, but also need the flexibility of private internal conversations.”

This is an eye opening combination of a collaboration tool supporting modern organizational practice – creating circles of communication. Transparency design choices are explicitly in the project management mix with the addition of private elements. Information can be transparent across all members of project — or not — as deemed appropriate by the project administrators and the task at hand. Karl Goldfield, Teambox vice president of sales and marketing, explained it to me with an example:

Wedding planners, like an Internet marketing lead, or any other general contractor, have lots of clients and subcontractors.  When it comes to certain things, you want open collaboration. A wedding planner doesn’t always want to filter [limit] information to clients and the florists or the caterers they work with. They invite the client to a project where they understand the different subcontractors they  can work with (for example, seeing all the information for all four possible caterers) — they all get to see things and discuss. Everyone is in this open place focused on working on what the client wants.

Think about that: The client, and all the bidding florists, caterers, etc. get to see the information from the others, though this level of transparency isn’t fixed. The conversation can go private, tighter circles can be created, perhaps as the bids come in, or perhaps only after particular bids are accepted.

I asked Karl about the response from the subcontractors.  Are they comfortable with this cross-organization, cross-competitor transparency?

Karl responded with a perfect Enterprise 2.0 answer:

People can already contact a [competing] caterer and find their pricing — and if [the competitor] wants to keep it private they can just not answer. But, if I’m a good wedding planner and work with a specific set of caterers and do 100 weddings a year and 25 percent of the projects come to you — I’m the caterer’s best buddy — even if 75 percent of the business goes to others. The caterer knows the final decision (the clients’) will be personal preference. This isn’t a question of the technology system, but one of the relationship.

Makes sense to me. Yes, I’d be giving information to my competitors, but I’m also learning through the process. If this work process brings us into a community, the benefits may outweigh any costs. We all become better caterers or florists.  We learn our own competitive advantages.  We have community members to cross-sell with and or to ask for help.

But not all wedding planners, Internet marketing teams, or other Teambox users may understand these community issues straight away. I asked Karl how Teambox helps people come to understand this. How do you help users learn how to manage all these options and strategic choices?

My goal for 2012 is an education campaign. Online videos, best-case scenarios. Eight to 10 core [types of users with demos on] how to make Teambox the central resource for communication…. We want to find ways of keeping the noise off your plate.

Karl had me think of two different types of project collaborators to clarify the information noise issue. The first is a highlevel manager who doesn’t want details. This manager just wants to follow a dashboard and a timeline — no drill down — as clean and quiet an interface as possible. That manager wouldn’t be part of the private elements until he or she asked for details and then the manager could be invited in. The second type might want a more micro understanding of how the project is going. It would take too much time to play middle-man with this manager so nothing in the project should be private; let him or her see everything as it happens.

Karl also talked about the evolution of how Teambox is used and how this helps people come to understand the value in their particular setting. Initially they might manage Teambox information completely from their email inbox (using Teambox’s notification and response systems). As their use becomes greater they will find value in managing Teambox content from the activity stream. But Karl suggests that you don’t push this approach to happen overnight. Let circle techniques evolve as use grows.

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Technology is rapidly changing, becoming more social and is quickly becoming an integrated part of our lives. With ever-evolving devices, social networks, and online video capabilities, we’re increasingly moving toward an “always on” existence.

Yet it’s almost as if a strange dichotomy exists: on one hand, we’re steadily moving in this new direction where Facebook and Twitter are a central part of our lives, but on the other, many of us are still slow to adopt video and video conferencing. While a great number of people are embracing constant connectivity, others seem to be too leery of the close-up.

The spy in your living room

An acquaintance of mine has a bad habit of recording people on his cell phone without their knowledge or consent. While casually hanging out with friends or family, it’s common to catch him capturing video of someone in the group and jokingly saying that he’s posting it to Facebook. It’s really annoying, but it also shows how when we could innocently be in the company of others without worrying that the things we say or do will end up broadcasted online are gone.

We advise teenagers and college students not to post lewd or indecent photos of themselves online, as they might come back to haunt them in future job searches and so on, but what about our own everyday conduct? Are we comfortable having that streamed live to the world 24/7?

In effect, life is becoming an all-access, behind-the-scenes pass where anyone with a cell phone and an Internet connection can follow us wherever we go, watching and recording everything we say and do.

Our resistance to the spotlight

Certainly, one could argue that this brave new world of social media, with no privacy and complete (perhaps to a fault) transparency, means greater truth and authenticity, but for most of us, I think there are certain times when we want to be able to let our guard down, and that doesn’t mean that we’re being dishonest or that we’re hiding our “real selves” — quite the contrary, during those times, we might feel the least like ourselves and don’t want that to be how we are ultimately perceived by those around us or by anyone online, especially those who generally see us in a more professional light.

Feeling as if we’re always in the spotlight also has the potential for leading us to a lack of intimacy and closeness with people in general, since relationships restricted to those created online often lack depth and meaning. For example, if we have sensitive conversations with close friends or family members, we might divulge details or thoughts to that person, as we’re in the process of developing our opinions around the subject. That doesn’t mean that those details are our opinions, but rather are helping us form our opinions, and the conversation itself is very much a part of that process. If we’re never allowed to have those types of conversations, how will that impact us developmentally and socially? At some point, there have to be boundaries to what gets broadcasted to the world and to what is considered for or against our reputations, online or off.

In short, we can’t be polished and professional at all times, nor can we ever be perfect — we’re human, and being human means bad days, bad moods, and even slumps sometimes. Yet the reality of our world today is that everything we say or do is displayed as if on an overhead projector, and we’re keenly aware of the fact that first impressions count, so how do we find the balance so that what we say or do today doesn’t come back to bite us tomorrow and so that we don’t become today’s version of Stepford wives, behaving just so, in order to avoid a bad rap?

How are you handling being “always on”?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Malias

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As the All Facebook blog points out, users must explicitly give permission to third-party apps wanting access to personal information, but many people probably won’t notice the addition of the words “current address and mobile phone number” to the text in the request window, and will likely click “allow” without realizing they’re granting so much access to their data.

This change is consistent with Facebook’s policy of encouraging openness. But for web workers who are increasingly using Facebook for business purposes, such a policy may not be welcome.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid making your postal address and mobile phone number available to third parties is to not include it in your Facebook profile at all. To edit this data, go to “Profile” at the top-right of the Facebook screen, then click on the “Edit Profile” button. From the menu on the left, click on “Contact Information.” Delete any information you may have entered in the “Mobile Phone” and “Address” fields, then click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen.

Note: if you’ve added a phone number in the “Other Phone” field, Facebook will copy that number into the “Mobile Phone” field if you leave the mobile number blank. So you’ll need to erase any phone numbers that you’ve entered into either field.

Do you include your personal contact information on your Facebook page?

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How do you feel about your right to be forgotten? To be honest, until I read this article, I didn’t realize being forgotten was a right. This news seems to reflect an intriguing new stage in our restlessly evolving relationship with technology.

Remember Me

Historically, humans have striven to be remembered. For millennia, individuals have spent their lives working to leave an inspiring, respectable legacy. Friends of mine who are parents cite that desire for legacy as one of the reasons why they have children. From the Egyptian pyramids to biological, astronomical and other scientific names that sport their discoverers’ own monikers, evidence abounds that many humans’ greatest desire is to leave their marks on the world.

Some argue that a key difference between humans and other animals is our memory. As a collective, we know that memory is precious, rich and often fleeting.

But technology breaks all the barriers humans face in the race to maintain recollection. Data can be stored indefinitely. And while previously web users were more concerned with saving data — backing up systems, distributing that storage across media and locations — and with organizing the information we had to allow easy, swift access to those digital memories, clearly, the tide is turning.

The question of a right to privacy seems to be less one of corporate data assets than it is about personal privacy. According to the report, this EU proposal was sparked by the fact that social networking sites failed to remove personal data that users themselves had supposedly deleted from the sites.

Yet the reason users are concerned about the preservation of that information — the perpetuation of a less-than-venerable online legacy — appears primarily to reflect a fear of our being poorly assessed by corporations and other bodies we may want to join.

Reputation Management

If you read about furor over a copyright complaint against cookery magazine Cooks Source last week, you know that reputations can be undone in an instant online. We watch the blunders of big players, and follow the online commentary that ensues — and while we may thrill to see the fat cats fail, we all know that next week, it could be us. HR could all too easily find those pictures of us acting up at a party, and then what?

In the past, we could rely on the frailty of human memory to dim the memories of our indiscretions. But now we have to fight to keep our legacy “pure” — to maintain, if you like, the consistency of our personal brands not just online, but in the world at large. We happily used technology to create virtual versions of ourselves. Now we’re finding those virtual versions more robust than we ever expected.

The good things we may have done, personally or professionally, don’t necessarily compete with the achievements of our peers. Perhaps they don’t make for such entertaining or popular photos. In the world of the Virtual Me, we may find it’s our less socially acceptable behavior, as depicted and recorded online, that differentiates us from others: job candidates, colleagues and contacts.

Mixing Business and Pleasure

When all is said and done, we own our personal data. Even if we provide an organization our details, the organization doesn’t own that information. The privacy laws that countries all over the world have developed are a testament to our agreement on this point.

So why do we need to assert our “right to be forgotten”? According to the article:

“Viviane Reding, Europe’s rights commissioner, said the world of data protection had been transformed by popular new technologies in the 15 years since data protection legislation was last amended.

‘Internet users must have effective control of what they put online and be able to correct, withdraw or delete it at will,’ she said.”

While no one disagrees with this principle, the fact is that people will remember us for who we are and what we do. If these proposed laws pass, they sound like they’ll be there to protect us from our reputations not among web users on the other side of the world, but among the people we know — or will meet — face-to-face, in our own towns and neighborhoods.

In that case, peoples’ online reputations are only part of the equation: we’ll have to hope our words and actions offline don’t speak too negatively for themselves.

What about you: are you worried that your “right to be forgotten” is being infringed?

Image by stock.xchng user Axonite.

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The extension blocks all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers, which keeps Facebook from gathering any data about your browsing activity on those sites, but (unlike some other Facebook Connect blocking tools) it doesn’t stop you using Facebook itself.

Facebook Disconnect can be downloaded from the Google Chrome Extensions repository. The developer (Googler Brian Kennish) says he plans on adding an omnibox icon to indicate when blocking is occurring, and that, as the extension was built in just one day, there may still be some bugs in it, although I’ve yet to find any (and the commenters on the extension’s home page all seem pretty happy, too). Note that the extension can break third-party apps on Faceboook itself.

(Via Download Squad)

Photo courtesy Flickr user rpongsaj.

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What’s that? Is that really the point of social networking?

Not for everyone. A study from earlier this year highlighted the importance of contact hubs — well-connected, influential individuals — over contact volume on social networking sites. And even though the pundits might advocate “authenticity” and “holistic personal branding”, many of us still simply want to use particular social network tools for specific purposes or agendas. Most of the web workers I know are selective about the people they connect with via social networks, and take different approaches to accepting contacts on different networks.

Let’s look a little more closely at the factors that can influence whether you accept a connection on any given social network.

Security

Each social network reveals something different about us as users. It’s not just a question of the information we post; it’s also a question of the network’s expectation of exposure, as evinced by their profile forms and service culture. Compare the type — and level — of detail invited by Facebook with the limited profile possibilities available at Twitter, and you’ll see what I mean.

Default security restrictions can have a big influence on who we’re willing to accept as a contact.

Self-Expression

The opportunities for self-expression, and the ways in which you want to express yourself on different social networks will likely influence the people you accept as contacts on each. I don’t accept business contacts on certain networks that I treat as strictly personal social networking opportunities.

Audience Expectation

The flip side of self-expression is your audience’s expectation of the information you’ll publish on a given network — or through a given account. A number of people I follow on Twitter have secondary, topic-specific Twitter accounts that attract a different following than their primary accounts. You may prefer to accept followers who have certain expectations of you on particular networks.

Your Social Strategy

Your social strategy — whether it’s formalized in a written document or based purely on gut instinct — will also affect who you accept as a follower or friend, and who you won’t. You probably wouldn’t accept as a contact a person you didn’t like, but you may well accept  a person you don’t know — depending on the network.

It’s true: for many of us, social networks are tools, and different rules apply than in the real world. So what’s your contact management strategy?

Defining Your Contact Management Strategy

What’s your social network contact management strategy?

This week I found myself pondering this question as a bunch of updates appeared in my feed from one social network for which I had no strong policy: LinkedIn.

Don’t get me wrong: the updates were inoffensive enough. But the thing was, I just didn’t care for them. I didn’t care about this person, primarily because I didn’t know them. It seemed that my contact strategy for this social network needed refining.

I spoke to a couple of friends about their experiences — and approaches to contact management — on LinkedIn. They both cited as their deciding factor  in accepting a contact whether or not they knew that person. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t accept their contact.

This raises important questions about the potential for social networks to expose us to new people and information. But it also reflects the security settings, and the nature of LinkedIn. It’s a professional network, so it’s conceivable that you’d want to accept contacts from people you hadn’t met, and I’d had good experiences doing just that. But , LinkedIn also contains a fair amount of my personal information.

For the moment, I was just uninterested in personal updates, but this raised the larger question: Should I be accepting as contacts people I didn’t know? I started taking a closer look at the information I’d published to the site. I also tried to identify specifically what I wanted to get out of this social network.

Balancing these two considerations — exposure and objectives — is important if we’re to arrive at an acceptable, satisfying contact management strategy.

In fact, those two points reflect the tug-of-war that each social network — online and offline — faces. In any human relationship we have to give in order to receive. The question is: how much do you want to give, and from whom do you want to receive?

How do you work out who to accept — and decline — as contacts in your social networking efforts?

Image by stock.xchng user stu360.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

Privacy and social networking is something that we’ve discussed at length here on WWD; I particularly liked Dawn’s comments in “Private or Personal in Social Media?” Unlike Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg I don’t believe that the “age of privacy” is over, but there’s no doubting that the more of your “stuff” that you share online, the less control you have over your privacy. Perhaps social networks will evolve to give us reliable, granular, context-sensitive privacy controls, such as those that ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick argues for. But until they do, we all need to be careful about who we share our stuff with, and where we share it.

Do you think that privacy and social networking are fundamentally incompatible?

Photo by Flickr user rpongsaj, licensed under CC BY 2.0

I think that Google Buzz feels slow to me because it has an interface that isn’t very mouse-friendly. It is laid out like Twitter’s web site, with one long timeline. But it also incorporates comments to the original posts in that timeline, so if a post gets lots of comments, it takes forever to scroll past it. Buzz does have keyboard shortcuts similar to the ones in Gmail or Google Reader, but using them means that I have to look at, and decide how to dispose of, each post individually. There doesn’t seem to be an “archive all” option similar to the “mark all as read” button in Reader.

Together with a lot of web workers, I depend on being able to skim through information sources quickly. Services like Google Reader are well-optimized for doing this, especially in List mode. (To turn on List mode, from the “All Items” view, click on “Show: List” in the blue bar at the top right of the screen.)

The List views in Gmail and Google Reader make it easy to look at the subjects of posts, and scroll through them quickly. Google Buzz, unfortunately, uses the threaded conversation approach of Google Wave, but without the tools for controlling what appears on the screen that Wave has.

I hope that the limitations of Google Buzz’s interface are just growing pains. Maybe the designers of Buzz didn’t anticipate that some posts would generate hundreds of comments. So let’s hope that they’ll give us the tools to use the service efficiently, or, as one commenter suggests, Google Buzz users might give up on it before it’s a week old.

Do you find using Buzz’s web interface slow and inefficient, too?

So, who owns your data, and who has access to it? In my latest Long View for GigaOM Pro, “Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?” (subscription required) I take an in-depth look at the issues of privacy, security and data ownership in the cloud; the legal protection (or lack of it) that your information has to protect it from unwanted snooping; and the steps that we should all be taking to minimize the risks of our data being accessed or used in ways that we hadn’t intended.

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Last week, I discussed how you can be both personal and professional in social media:

You can actually be professional and personal at the same time in social media without too much effort. When we talk about “being personal” on social media web sites, I think that many people confuse “personal” with “private.” The reality is that you get to decide what to share and what not to share, so you can still keep most areas of your private life private.

Now, let’s talk about the private information. Sites like Facebook can change their policies at any time to make information that was once private become public. Ed Gubbins on GigaOM Pro (subscription required) points out that “to satisfy their privacy concerns, users will have to take a more sophisticated and hands-on approach to managing their accounts, and that means Facebooking is going to get more complicated.”

For those of us who work mainly online, this means that we need to be especially careful about what we share and how we share it. In general, I don’t share anything that would be devastating if a client, prospective employer or family member read it. In fact, my mom, my sister, other family members and clients all follow my Twitter feed and/or Facebook status, so they see much of what I say online. I’m not going to say anything that would damage those relationships even in areas that seem to be more “private.”

I consider everything that I share online, even in “private” areas,  to be public information. If I would be embarrassed to have a family member or client see it, I don’t post it. Keep those drunken ramblings, too much information (TMI) moments, and other sensitive data off of the social media sites if you need to also maintain your professionalism online.

How do you balance what information you keep private vs. what you post online?

Photo by Flickr user Ted Percival used under Creative Commons.

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As an example, suppose you want to make your cell phone number available to personal friends, but you don’t want business contacts to see it. Here’s how.

Step 1. Assign Your Contacts to Friend Groups

From Facebook’s Friends menu, select the “All Friends” dropdown. To the right of each friend’s name, you’ll see an “Add to List” option. Click the down arrow and select a list, or if you’ve never created any lists, type a new list name in the text box. For the purposes of this example, I’m creating two lists — “Business” and “Personal.”

Once you’ve assigned a friend to a list, the name of the list will appear below their name. You can add people to more than one list if you wish. Repeat for each contact in your “All Friends” screen. This process goes very quickly, and you don’t need to save your changes.

Step 2. Create Privacy Settings for Your Friend Groups

Go to Facebook’s Settings menu and select the Privacy Settings dropdown option. Click Profile, then click the Contact Information tab. Next to the Mobile Phone listing, click the dropdown and select “Customize.” In the popup window that appears, select the “Some Friends” button, then type the name of the list of those who should see this data in the text box marked “Type the name of a friend or friend list.”

While you’re in this screen, you’ll probably want to select “None of My Networks,” since if you select a network, anyone in that network, even if they aren’t a friend, can see your information. And note that you can block specific people or lists from seeing this specific item by typing their names into the “Except These People” box. When you’re done, you’ll need to click “Save,” then “Save Changes” on the Profile Information screen.

Step 3. Edit Your Profile

From the main Facebook menu, click Profile. Underneath your picture at the upper left of the page, click “Edit My Profile.” Click the Info tab, then scroll down and click the gray “Contact Information” bar. Next to “Mobile Phone,” add your phone number in the format shown. Click “Save Changes,” then scroll back to the top of the contact data and click the Done Editing button.

It’s sort of annoying that one has to go through so many steps to make such a simple change, but Facebook does provide a useful tool to make sure you’ve done everything correctly. Near the top of the Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Profile page, enter a friend’s name in the box marked “See how a friend sees your profile” and your profile will be displayed as that person sees it. You’ll see what groups and networks the person belongs to, and you’ll be offered a link to re-edit your privacy settings if necessary.

Share your Facebook privacy tips below.

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But social networks can also be great time-wasters, too. However, If you focus on the marketing aspects of the networks, the time spent using them can consist of, as Meryl says, “zero-guilt activities.” Here are some tips for using social networks as effective marketing tools.

Join the active networks. There are literally thousands of social networks to choose from (digFoot lists over 3,700). But most are small, not very active, or of interest only in specific fields or geographic regions. I’ve spent the last month looking at many networks, and have decided that for me, it makes sense to focus on just four.

• LinkedIn. Often described as “Facebook for business,” LinkedIn combines a very large user base, excellent tools for finding connections, and lively discussion groups. Its system for making recommendations is very well-managed. It has so many features that its menu system can be obscure at times, but it’s well worth learning to navigate through the site.
• Facebook. The growth of this network is phenomenal — it’s claiming 700,000 new users every day! Even six months ago, most of my Facebook friends were under 30. Now, even we in the older generation have discovered it: I now have almost as many Facebook friends as I do LinkedIn connections, even though I joined LinkedIn several months before Facebook. Facebook is still a much more informal place than LinkedIn, but it’s becoming a valuable business tool as Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups (see below) evolve.
• Twitter. Technically, Twitter isn’t a social network, but it can be great for business communication and networking with customers, colleagues and friends. Facebook is highlighting its status update functionality to make it more “Twitterish,” so we’ll see how the two services compete.
• Yelp. This review site is new on my radar, but so far, I’m impressed with how active it is (at least in my part of the world). Now that it has a function allowing businesses to provide details of their services, it may become a very useful marketing tool, especially since it is now integrating a way to share reviews on Facebook. It is geographically based, however, and home workers may not want to provide a public street address.

Create pages for your business on LinkedIn, Facebook and Yelp. You may also want to create a Twitter account for your business that is separate from your personal account.

Join groups within the social networks where people you know are likely to hang out. In my opinion, the reason that LinkedIn and Facebook haven’t become unmanageable as they’ve gotten bigger, is that they’ve encouraged the development of small groups where people can talk about shared interests. Increase your credibility and visibility by using your professional expertise to add to these discussions.

Post frequently, but judiciously. Meryl’s comments about Twitter overload applies to the social networks as well. I’ll also add that services allowing one to post simultaneously to multiple networks, such as Ping.fm, are great, but should be used carefully. The networks have different audience demographics, and this should be kept in mind when you’re deciding what and where to post.

Use the networks’ automated tools for finding people you know. The networks can, with your permission, review your address book and see who you know who’s already on their network. They also have a “people you may know” function that recommends possible contacts. LinkedIn’s system has worked well for me; Facebook’s seems to be less accurate. The recommendations presented to you are based on background data (schools attended, former jobs) you provide to the networks, so it’s worth the time to provide complete information in your profiles — assuming you are comfortable with their privacy policies.

Use RSS feeds to follow what the members of your network are doing. The folks who run the social networks want you to visit their web sites, of course, but I find it more convenient to follow the activity of my connections through an RSS reader.

Add your Facebook instant message account to your IM program. Facebook’s instant message system can be added to multi-protocol IM programs. On my Mac, I prefer Adium; the PC users in my company like Pidgin or Digsby.

Use privacy settings to minimize email notifications. For Facebook, the AllFacebook blog has an excellent privacy primer; note, though, that Facebook is in the process of updating its privacy settings. And check out PC World’s discussion of privacy settings for LinkedIn. You’ll want to use these settings to control how and when the social networks email you. I find that since I follow the networks’ RSS feeds, I can turn off most of their emails.

It’s exciting to watch as the social media landscape changes every day. In the near future, it’s likely that some social networks will become important business tools, while others will fade away. In the meantime, we can learn how best to use these tools to increase the success of our endeavors.

What techniques do you use to manage social networks effectively?

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Some contracts will spell out confidentiality requirements, and some jobs come with a clear non-disclosure agreement attached. But what if you don’t have a written explanation of what your employer or client wants? Here are the crucial aspects I considered in making privacy my priority.

Meet Your Employer’s Expectations

For most of us, this is more likely to be about respecting your employer’s needs with regards to confidentiality, and observing a few basic ground rules, than it is about protecting state secrets. You don’t necessarily need an in-home safe and a retina scanner on the door to your office. But you do need to view confidentiality as a basic and reasonable expectation of your employer or client, and to be prepared to respect that need.

Collaboration

Collaboration can be a double-edged sword if the person you’re working with doesn’t feel the same way you do about observing your employer’s need for confidentiality. I make sure I agree clearly, up front, about confidentiality with the people I brainstorm with. Your employers might not object to you consulting with other professionals about their project, but they’ll be suitably upset if their plans are leaked.

Organization is Key

I find that organization is crucial to observing confidentiality. Keeping all your physical documents and information together in a place that’s easily secured (like a lockable filing cabinet or cupboard) is a lot easier to do on an ongoing basis if you store all that information in some sort of logical format from the start. I try to keep all the information relating to particular projects together. It makes putting it all away safely, and knowing what’s where when I need to access it again, much easier.

Making regular backups of information and keeping them somewhere safe is also a good way to track the information you have in your possession. That way, if your laptop’s stolen, for example, you can show your employer the exact information to which the thieves may have access. Even though the thieves may be pawning your computer at that precise moment, knowing exactly what information is now “in the public arena” may help quell your employer’s fears — or give them the means to create an action plan to respond to the leak if need be.

Location Matters

Think about the places where you work, and the security risks those locations pose. Your dedicated home office space might seem secure, but how’s the security on your home network? And on your computer itself?

My office space is now part of my living space; it used to be in my guest room. So I’ve always needed to ensure that when people come over, I put sensitive information out of sight. If you have the luxury of a dedicated office, you might simply be able to close the door on it.

It’s easy to think you don’t need to set a password on your computer in your home office, but what if that computer goes missing, or someone else tries to access it? You can be sure your employers or clients will want to know it’s password-protected, at the very least.

Also consider security when you’re on the road. Maybe you’ll need a screensaver for those moments when you’re staring out the train window, deep in thought (and the guy next to you is checking out the work you’re doing for a big-name company).

Processes for Privacy

I find it easiest to set up a few basic processes that help me ensure I maintain employer confidentiality.

• I password-protect my computer and use a screensaver.
• I make sure my network is secured.
• I lock my computer away when I leave it at home for any length of time.
• I don’t work on highly sensitive pieces of work in public places.
• I pack away all files out of sight before anyone comes to stay or I leave home for an extended period. I have a set of lockable drawers, so this isn’t a big deal.
• I’m extremely careful when traveling with my computer (as everyone is) and I try not to take confidential hard-copy documents on the road unless I really need them.

What do you do to protect your employer’s confidentiality?

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The US-based service enables users to capture the audio content of any phone call or conference calls in their entirety for later transcription to text by the service. Users can also markup parts of the call for particular emphasis during the transcription process. Apparently marking up such segments of a call is as simple as hitting a touchtone keypad to issue stop and start commands, though I’m sure a visual aid to this would be a welcome future addition.

Indeed, the service derives its name from ‘cogent ideas’, the parts of conversations that seem to be the most important.

Like reQall, the service is using a combination of speech-to-text technology and human assistance to produce accurate transcripts. However what’s probably more useful than the transcript itself are the implications of a digitized record of audio conversations. All of a sudden, a previously transitory and inert medium becomes searchable, sharable and intrinsically more valuable. Of course there are privacy implications in recording calls, but no more complex than existing issues in retaining phone calls.

At $30/month for 1000 minutes it’s a pricey service, but perhaps the company has inadvertently developed a ‘Gmail for voice’. Regardless, additional price tiers may be neccessary to encourage casual use and wider adoption.

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How do we maintain privacy when we work on such a public platform?

Separate your personal life and your work when it comes to online interaction. Any apps, blogs, or social networking accounts should be separate from your professional accounts.  Alternatively, you can categorize your contacts into separate groups, such as friends, family, business, and filter which types of updates are visible to each group.

This might seem time consuming, but you don’t want a diligent internet troll to start harassing your friends or playing with your holiday photos via Photoshop and sharing it with your clients.  You don’t want your friends and family to be too informed about your work either (I remember my mother seeing one of my clients on Facebook and asking me if she could go out with him). That may be far-fetched, but it’s not something I personally want to risk.

I keep a personal blog on some free blogging platforms – intended for close friends and family only.  Most of my posts are visible only to contacts I have approved.  My professional blog, of course, is free for the rest of the web to read.

Get a pseudonym. Web workers sometimes use nicknames, online screen names, or only their first names as their working name online.  This approach to getting more privacy seems to elicit a variety of reactions.  Some people are for it, while others don’t think it’s necessary, or they think it goes against the culture of transparency on the web.  Online workers such as Skellie, Adii Rockstar, and blogger John Cow (for a time) are just a few examples. You can also use an alias that sounds more like a “real name”.

A pseudonym can also be useful if you want to work on projects that aren’t relevant to the personal brand you’re building.  When I used to write about relationships and dating, it wasn’t something I was passionate about pursuing, so I used a variety of aliases for my work.  Only my clients knew my real name.

The downsides to working with a pseudonym, especially if it doesn’t sound like a “real name”, is that in some cases, it might lead to mistrust.  Still, this could be overcome once you’ve built a reputation on providing quality services.

Monitor your digital footprint. You can do a regular search of your name, pseudonyms, and other nicknames you use on the web.  If you want to automate this, you can simply use Google Alerts to keep up with any new searchable items relevant to your name.  Twitter Search, BackType Alerts, and FriendFeed Search also allow you to search any keyword within their services.

Check the privacy settings and privacy policy of every new app, social network, or online service you’re using. This may sound like common sense, but it’s something that many people neglect.  Call me paranoid, but I tend to check my privacy settings on social networking accounts every few months or so.  Sometimes they add new features or change something and it affects the initial settings I established.

Mike Gunderloy also wrote about the terms and conditions of online office applications, which had interesting points about privacy.  On a related note, the Pew Internet Project conducted a survey on cloud computing with the following results:

…cloud users show high levels of concern when presented with scenarios in which companies might use their data for purposes users may or may not fully understand ahead of time.  This suggests user worry over control of the information they store online.  For nearly all of the scenarios shown, most users of cloud applications say they would be very concerned if their data were sold, used in marketing campaigns, not deleted as requested, or used for targeted ads.

Source: “Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services”, September 2008, Pew Internet & American Life Project

How about you, how concerned are you with your privacy as a web worker?  How do you manage your digital footprints?  What experiences have you had with online privacy?

Image by Dan Shirley from sxc.hu

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The latest to join the fray is Cellity‘s Address Book 2.0, launched earlier this month, at the LeWeb’08 conference in Paris. The service promises to centralize and synchronize a user’s communication points from sources as diverse as Outlook, Twitter, cellphones and social networks.

The service provides a single view of all your contact information, from their various origins,  then presents the user with various communication tasks that can be invoked for each contact – sending email, SMS, conference calls, status messages and other activities. Interestingly, even if the link to the origin service is severed, Cellity maintains its own copy of contacts from that source.

Like many similar contact aggregation services, services like Twitter and Facebook are plumbed into Cellity’s by entering your account details for those services – something I’m becoming very uncomfortable with as startups building on those networks begin to proliferate. Not only are you handing off your credentials to others, but contact points for hundreds, if not thousands, of your valued relationships – an issue explored more fully by Pamela just over a month ago.

I’m beginning to think the current approach of aggregating contact from various services and then making them viewable on multiple platforms is not enough…no service can support every device, every social network and every contact source. Even the mighty Google sees Contacts as no more than an adjunct feature of email, rather than a valuable stand-alone service that can service many other applications.

Perhaps we need a WordPress-like approach to this problem space…

• A freely available open-source service along the lines of WordPress.org or laconi.ca that users and organisations can deploy on their own servers to host their own contact information -  based on open-standards like FOAF, SyncML and vCard/hCard – this could be as simple as a web page embedded with microformatted contact information and suitable permissions.
• A freemium hosted equivalent (such as identi.ca or WordPress.com) for less-sophisticated users to host their contact information on public servers.
• Address books are simply the connections, relationships and permissions between those contact hosts.
• Encourage developer communities to provide plugins and support for analytics, phones, social networks, desktop address books etc.

We’ve seen how open source blogging platforms have evolved quickly to support almost every niche – perhaps harnessing the same structures can help bring about the mythical Address Book 2.0.

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