Privacy and the Social Graph

Mathew posts on Sir Tim’s anointment of “social graph”, a term that I assume Dave Winer invented. As Mathew notes, Berners-Lee remarks that connecting to the hive mind involves some amount of surrender: “The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits. People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people’s packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over.” The question of the day, of course, is how that surrender intersects with privacy.