Possible Challenges II: Privacy

In this post, I want to continue my talk on possible challenges this networking site could face; specifically, privacy.

Though not as detailed as MySpace or Facebook, this social network will still contain a certain amount of personal data; data that users might not want certain parties to read. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to set filters on searchable information, much like Facebook has done. With Facebook’s filters, users can set their information to be viewable by a customizable range of people; from the public, to only friends, to even only certain users. Further options enable the user to choose to index his or her profile for search engines, allowing the user to opt out of having his profile show up on a Google search. This works out great on a purely social networking site, as most people you connect with on Facebook or MySpace are (hopefully) people you trust and/or know in real life. Where it gets tricky is a site like this one, where a user has to be able to allow other users to search for him or her and view the profile for compatibility with other musicians, while also being able to restrict certain information from coming up in a search. While a street address is certainly a handy thing to have on your profile, to make sure you’re within acceptable commuting range of another band, you might not want it displayed to absolutely everyone who searches for guitarists in your area. The tricky part is in letting people know how and when to use these tools, rather than the tools themselves. As mentioned before, simple filters can allow for a huge range of customizable privacy options. However, users might not necessarily make use of them fully, and when trouble arises, I, as the creator and manager of the site, could be held liable.

An easy, if annoying solution, would be to force people to go through an interactive tutorial at the time of registration to learn about privacy tools available to them. If that’s asking too much, it’s always possible to make this tutorial optional, and have legal language explaining that if the user opts out of using a tutorial, we are not to be held liable for information that ends up in the wrong places.

Next post, I’ll hopefully get into some input/output stuff; more specifically, the inputting of recorded audio as music samples, and how best to have other users hear this media.