I’ve been playing with Brightkite lately and while I’m not sure exactly why, it has been fun. Really, this is just Dodgeball 2.0 and had Google not let it languish, who knows where that would be, but woulda’, shoulda’, coulda’, right? There aren’t many people on Brightkite yet but in NYC, it’s interesting to see who else has been at a location or to look who is near you. As I said, I’m not sure exactly what’s there, why people are going to actively use this or where the money is, but if Twitter can get an $80 million pre, who am I to nay-say?
Like I said, Brightkite has been fun, but a site that allows me to publish my location constantly and follow other people’s locations certainly does ring privacy bells. To be fair, the site apparently has all sorts of levels of authorizations that I haven’t checked out yet and even without that, what people choose to do with the Brightkite service is the responsibility of that individual. I have a friend whose mother won’t even use credit cards for fear of being tracked and here I am on facebook, linkedin, flickr, and twitter just to name a few. Even with all of that, this latest toy gives me pause.
I was sitting in a web cafe playing with Brightkite, when I decided to check out who was “around me”. Well, not 2 minutes later, I was looking at a picture of this girl in the area just after she had jumped out of bed. It wasn’t particularly scandalous and the inter-web certainly has spicier just a click away. What made me feel a little creepy was that while viewing this picture of an absolute stranger, I knew exactly where she currently was.
I had a similar sensation a couple months ago when sending an email to someone I’d previously met. He is an MIT Sloan alumnus from an earlier year and I was simply looking to touch base and maybe get some job hunting advice. After our first meeting, I started to follow his flickr photo stream. As a result, in my email, I was able to congratulate him on his recently born, second child. I do know this person to some extent, he does live a semi-public life and I didn’t feel I had crossed any lines in reaching out or in getting information. However, it still felt a little odd about how much I knew about someone I don’t really know.
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures recently touched on this as well. My point is simply, it will be very interesting to see how people make their choices about their own preferred balance of privacy vs utility. Megan Smith, in charge of New Business Development at Google, came to speak at MIT Sloan and I asked her about something related. I theorized that those growing up with Facebook and the rest of the social tools don’t appreciate that the information they put out there for their “friends” to see is really out there for any and everyone. Her response was that it isn’t that they are unaware, it is that they simply do not care. They have never known anything different. Do you remember when you weren’t able to publish every thought?
