I didn't write this post for myself. I wrote it on behalf of every single person in Twitter who chooses to take advantage of a built in feature that designers thought was important enough to include.

I'm no n00b

I've been online a long time. I have lived and worked online since the late 90's when I got an internet connection through my university.

I love to explore and try things. I will try just about every new web service or tool that sounds different than the ones before. I'm a long time blogger and have explored many social networks within weeks of their arrival. But as open as I am to exploring, I'm also a critically minded adopter who doesn't mindlessly accept increasingly bad terms of service or "opt out" paradigms of use.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago (before social media), human social groups had different ways of establishing community, trust and power bases. We had personal settings that we adjusted according to the nature (or newness) of a particular relationship. We called them boundaries. Some of us thought it might be a good idea to have these kinds of settings in our online social spaces. We called these people user-centered designers.  

Being "protected" in Twitter

I got my first invitation to Twitter very shortly after it launched. For me, it was too early and I couldn't yet see the purpose. When I finally started participating, a large enough user base made it more worthwhile. And most of the people I wanted to talk to were there too.

I wasn't particularly afraid of "sharing" in Twitter. It was less a matter of "what" I was sharing than "where" and "with whom." What was new and different was having conversations in plain view of anyone else and having my relationships and networks exposed. That's where this tool goes into territory that is much more personally meaningful because my networks include people who matter to me beyond the random strangers who join my network later on.

As far as I can remember, danah boyd is of the few online voices to point out that sharing the nature of our relationships and networks carries different consequences according to power, privilege and existing social capital. For a political activist, the disclosure of allies and trusted friends is counterproductive to activism. Likewise, for an elementary or secondary school teacher, who understand that their identities are highly mediated by professional bodies and stakeholders - boards, administrators, principals, parents and students - the need for boundaries is more than a personal choice but a professional necessity.

Lots of experienced webby people have chosen protected updates. For example, veteran webby woman, Liz Lawley, aka Mamamusings, has this in her Twitter bio: "if you don't have my phone number you're not getting my twitter updates..."

Social media needs social settings

My questions about the context of public conversations in Twitter has nothing to do with technology, prudery, hiding or "not getting it" this has to do with a global information paradigm that many of us - in our breathless haste to join in and "be a part of" things haven't really properly examined.

Even Facebook, a service that was notoriously hostile to the stated requests of users, has changed its privacy settings to allow us to decide who, specifically, has access to what. I believe the reason they changed things was because a lot of users like me made a lot of noise - and we didn't stop making noise - until they gave us the settings we demanded.

Unfortunately Twitter is a much simpler tool that reveals your entire network, status updates and conversations to anyone and everyone who has access to your feed - including, thanks to RSS, the entire internet. You have only two choices: total exposure or partial exposure. It is not "granular" as information designers would say.

"Isn't protected updates missing the point?"

This is the most common objection I've heard from people who don't understand protected updates. This response is problematic on two levels.

First, there is the notion that Twitter has an undisputable, agree-upon and specific "point." Yet, all we really know about Twitter is what each of us chooses to do with it according to the settings provided. Developers built in certain features with different needs in mind. If the service offers us an option, that's their way of saying it's up to us how it is we wish to use that tool.

I don't like rules lawyers. I don't like other people telling me how I should properly use a tool - particularly when that tool is emergent. The thing about best practices? Everybody's got one. A best practice is contextual to a particular type of user and purpose.

The second problem I have with (the notion that somebody else knows better than I do how I should use a tool) is how this oft stated reasoning constitutes a profound ignorance of privacy politics online. As Cory Doctorow and others have repeatedly pointed out: privacy is not the same as secrecy. And privacy is a right we're quickly giving away.

You hear people say "what have you got to hide?" It's not about hiding or secrecy it's about basic and fundamental democratic rights. Not wanting your phone tapped isn't about wanting to hide things, it's about the right to life without surveillance.

Similarly with social networking privacy online, I'm not "concealing" my conversations in Twitter. I'm simply making a choice about who has access to my friends and conversations. Every time you go to meet a friend for a coffee at a cafe, other people may be in earshot and you accept this as part of being in a public space. Setting up a shotgun mic, detailing each of our identities and listing all our friends, and then sending this broadcast out to the internet is a different story. Better yet, how about putting a mic on your lapel and wearing that all day long - when you go to the doctor's office, when you're with your friends, when you're with your coworkers and when you go to the bathroom.

RSS feeding my life to the internet: no thank you

Many people don't realise this but a public account means you are automatically generating live feed of your life for the entire internet. I think a lot of people haven't really thought this one through. Seriously. It's one thing for me to broadcast an RSS of my blog. It's quite another for me to distribute endless copies of my conversations to places unknown. To generate data that can be repurposed into any online aggregator. Many Twitter-fed sites have popped up everywhere delivering a ready copy of all of your latest tweets.  

In one case, I read of a woman whose public feed was aggregated into a fake (sleazy) dating profile in another country. Her conversations, @'s and commentaries were delivered into this profile. Imagine if she made the mistake of tweeting the location of an event she was attending or any other bit of personal information we often let slip while amusing ourselves in Twitter - among our "friends."  

The bottom line

I shouldn't have to explain why I want to protect my updates. Nobody should. Nor should the desire for personally meaningful social settings need be explained. Sadly, a great many people - in their rush to join up, join in and take part - are not spending nearly enough time thinking very deeply about the larger social, personal and professional implications of these activities. All of us are new to these very new tools. Let people be cautious, questioning and careful (as well as enthusiastic and exploring). These are good human instincts - our inclinations for survival got us pretty far as a species :)

Required viewing:

Cory Doctorow: Is it time for a privacy revolution? (video)

"Deciding when and under what circumstances your personal information is divulged tracks very closely to how free and how much power you have in a society" - Cory Doctorow