Eye on Winer

Imagine that Dave starts using a new web app.

Imagine, then, that the app starts publishing a list of all of the new users with links to their online identities.

Imagine that this is an “opt out” situation.

What’s the over/under on the number of web-tantrums Dave would throw?

Dave made a change to FlickrFan (probably sent out via the mandatory phone-home autoupdater) in which the flickr account names to all new users to the software are published online. Long-time readers who know that that Dave is a “do as I say, not as I do” kinda guy will guess that this new “feature” is… SURPRISE… opt-out.

What’s more, when questioned about it, here’s what he says:

Since we’re still in the first 24 hours, the culture of this community is still to be determined.

It’s going to be a fairly open community thing, that’s what I hope to telegraph from this. Have the discussion now, as opposed to later.

To the other poster, of course I was following the Facebook stuff, and if you go back through the archive of Scripting News you’ll find that I wasn’t terribly critical of what they were doing because I understood the issues and tradeoffs.

Let’s deconstruct that, shall we?

The culture of the community is “still to be determined” he says… then, mere pixels later, it’s determined! “It’s going to be a fairly open community thing”, he says. He hopes to “telegraph” that with an obscure note in a change-log.

Dave apparently thinks that he’s the one that gets to decide what the community’s culture is.

He says that he wasn’t “terribly critical” of Facebook (which he wasn’t) but he says he understood the issues and trade-offs. Hmmm…

jmdelaney says that the newest Facebook issue is serious. I don’t doubt that it is, I just don’t fully understand the issue, and I bet a lot of other people don’t either.

He goes on to write:

I might not mind having a purchase of an electronic gadget be a public act (with conditions) where I would mind disclosure of medications. Clearly this should be up to the individual to decide. Until I understand how it works, I’d like the default to be opt-out, and I decide to opt-in on a case by case basis

(Emphasis in both quotes mine)

Just more evidence of something we already know: that Dave operates in a world of double standards… he he holds his privacy paramount and thinks of others’ as a roadblock to his goals.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Privacy, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.