You might recall we started The Albion Society a couple of months ago, as a place to debate the thorny issues we find ourselves wrestling with on a daily basis. The first meeting tackled human incited climate change.
We’ve now announced the second meeting, to take place on the 25th March, where we’ll debate whether socially-aware media is the future of communications, or the end of individual privacy as we know it?
(Image from Add To Friends Gear Facebook app, via crackunit.com)
At Albion we’re all avid users of Facebook, but we think it’s a lot more than the next latest fad site for late twenty-somethings to get all nostalgic for the friends they used to have time to see in real life. Along with Google’s OpenSocial and now the MySpace platform, we think that Facebook are busy creating ‘socially-aware media’.
Socially aware media can understand who we are, who we’re connected to, and how we’re connected to them. And they can leverage that understanding to make us feel more connected to our friends, and to realise the long promised dream of personalisation.
But at the same time as getting excited about these possibilities, we can’t help wondering about the implications of sharing all this information.
Using social networks means putting unprecedented levels of trust in new, small, often idiosyncratically-managed companies. And putting unprecedented levels of personal information into the ether. As people working in media we know what we’re doing and are happy to balance the benefits with the risks. But do mainstream users of Facebook realise what they’re doing, and what rights they’re giving up?
And that’s what we want to debate. Is privacy as we knew it dead, and we should just get over it? Or will there soon be a social media disaster that will see us deleting our profiles and scurrying back to the pub to meet our friends in the real world?
We’ve already got some key speakers lined up:
- Saul Klein, investor in social networks Dopplr and Kindo.
- Gi Fernando of Techligtenment, a leading social media application developer.
- Chris Hackford, Legal Partner at the IPA, currently writing papers on data privacy
So it should be an interesting evening. If you’d like to join, please drop us an email. Places are very limited (because our meeting rooms are quite small) so apologies in advance if we can’t squeeze you in.
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