Yahoo and Twitter Kick Data Sharing up a Notch
For any data processing professional, the protection of client data is a high priority. Not only is a huge amount of effort put into the integrity and usability of data, significant expense and work is done to make sure that data is not disclosed beyond the relationship between a customer and the institution. You see that ethic in action when there is a firestorm of outrage when user data is compromised by a bank or financial institutions, which can lead to that dreaded phrase - identity theft.
Our inherent urge to keep data secure and confidential continues to be assaulted as the internet seems to be going the route of spilling everything about you out into cyberspace for the world to know about. If there is one internet trend that has turned a flow of compromised information into a volcano, it is the explosion of social networking.
There has been plenty written about how much personal information is on display for the world to see on Facebook and Twitter. And while social networks put on a brave front about how hard they are working to protect private data of their users, deals being made in back rooms only accelerate the trend to share your private data with anyone who has the money to get access to it.
Now the evidence of that back room deal making has come out in full view in an agreement between Yahoo and Twitter to share user data. Yahoo's lust to sink their teeth into a rich repository of user information goes way back. It started when they failed to buy out Facebook for over $1 billion before Facebook became a household word. Now that social networking is the hottest thing since search engines were invented, Yahoo wants in.
It is no secret by the private information that social networks have in abundance has such a huge cash value. It all comes down to one word - marketing. Not long ago, if an internet marketer could just harvest your email address, they were in online marketing heaven. Social networks go much further than just getting emails. On Facebook alone, they can gather phone numbers, addresses, what groups you belong to, your favorite activities and even details about what products you like. This is nothing but pure gold to companies who want to build target marketing strategies. And that information can be sold for high price tags to the highest bidder.
Yahoo finally got their opening into this gold mine of user information when they finalized a deal with Twitter to share user data between the two domains. This is not their first success in the deal making in cyberspace between just last December, they closed a similar agreement with Facebook. This means that tweets on Twitter along with Facebook status messages and other updates can be tapped by the Yahoo search engine. So if you want to have fun and post a status or tweet "I am a vampire", all of cyberspace will instantly be informed that you are a vampire.
These deals are being portrayed as ways to serve these large social networks better. But let's not be naive here because these deals are clearly in response to similar agreements that have been made between Microsoft and Google recently. Clearly, the big power players in internet information and data access are merging with each other to make data sharing even more a fact of life than it already was.
The value to users of Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook is that as these services become more like one online data location. What you post on one service will be usable on the other. For a long time, the fact that people like to post tweets of their activities almost moment to moment seems very similar to how some people post status updates on Facebook. So if you could post something in one service and have it pop up on the other, isn't that a tremendous labor savings that these public spirit minded social networks are doing for us?
Yahoo operates one of the most active chat services on the internet as well. If you build a yahoo account, every effort will be made to encourage you to provide large amounts of profile data that can be used within the vast Yahoo services offerings including email, chat, personals and other services. Ever since Yahoo began to lose out as the premier search engine on the web to Google, their emphasis on provide domain services that are beyond the conventional search engine job descriptions has been aggressive. This step of beginning to share huge caches of user data will make those ambitions to create one central library of rich marketing data a reality.
The one thing that big social networks depend upon to keep their large populations active is trust. When you are on Facebook, you have some trust that the site is safe from hackers, viruses or spyware. You want to feel safe that your data will be protected and that if you set your security so your private information won't be shared, it won't be. Of course, most of those assumptions long ago proved to be faulty.
Hackers seem to have no trouble getting into Facebook and Twitter accounts. And with each passing month, the number of advertising "spam" that is hitting your account on either service is getting greater and greater. We all went through this with email and the result was an entire new industry of products and services designed to stop the spam in email. If the epidemic of spam takes over Facebook and Twitter, one wonders if their populations may just jump ship rather than spend money to be able to keep posting statuses and tweeting away while putting up with compromises to their user data.
It is a matter of opinion whether the sharing of data between these huge internet powerhouse businesses represents a breach of trust. If you use all three services and have fully developed profiles on each internet property, it probably will turn out to be a nice convenience to have one profile fit all. Then if you do want to update your relationship status, it is one post that flows out to every service you are on.
But if you are a bit suspicious of big companies getting generous with data that belongs to you, you are not alone in that reaction to this news. Many people enjoy social networks but would like to do so without every detail about them being shared with the world. Many of us would like to be able to share with a friend that we like a movie or a certain restaurant without seeing that opinion become a marketing blitz because your private data is being sold on the open market to anyone who would like to use it to sell something to you. It is important that we keep our eyes on the big players in the internet world and not let deals like this one go by without notice. At very least, it is a wake up call to take care posting anything personal on any online service. Because if you post it somewhere, before long, you may inadvertently be posting it everywhere.
Filed Under: Featured • News in Technology
