Dopp Juice Archive

I had the pleasure and honor of being interviewed yesterday by the fabulous Miss Lilycat on Pirate Cat Radio about blogging and gender — two very different topics which somehow blended together nicely. The interview was two hours long, interspersed with some music, distractions, and other neat stuff. With Lilycat’s permission, I’ve edited it down for you into easier-to-digest segments:

Interview on Pirate Cat Radio: Segments

1. Part 1 (15 minutes) – Overview of my blogs, discussion about Twitter, Internet karma
2. Part 2 (21 minutes) – My history with blogging, my history with poetry, privacy and secrets on the web, my gender identity
3. Part 3 (18 minutes) – Transgender issues, my sexuality, gender in the media, “hitting bottom”, pronouns and etiquette with genderqueer people
4. Part 4 (4 minutes) – Gender fetish, queer community, Genderfork.com, “My mom is awesome”
5. Part 5 (6 minutes) – Wrapping up: “Relax about gender and go get yourself a blog.”

And while I’m still using my fifteen minutes of identity politics fame, I should mention I was also interviewed recently by Dr. Karen Rayne about my experience growing up as queer. Please take a look at Part 1 and Part 2. Then share Dr. Karen’s blog with everyone you know who is raising a teenager. It’s an excellent resource for perspective.

There’s a lot of buzz right know around something called the social graph. This buzz is very geeky, and if you’re not already immersed in geeky conversations about Internet privacy and identity, this buzz might be going over your head. That’s a shame, though, because you probably do care about it.

What’s a Social Graph?

You have lots of contacts. Some are professional colleagues, some are personal friends, some are both of those, and some are more complicated than that. A social graph is a snapshot of who you’re connected to and how. The specifics are super-geeky, so I’m not gonna go any deeper than that.

What’s Happening Now?

Google just released something called the Social Graph API. This is going to make it easier for social networking websites to share information about who you’re connected to. This opens up a huge can of worms in terms of privacy and identity and security and all that fun stuff that the Internet’s been debating since it was born.

How Does This Affect You?

At the moment, it doesn’t. It’s too new. But it’s pushing the borders on what we need to think about when we use social networking websites, and that’s going to matter to you as soon as it gets to your favorite websites. Looking ahead to the not-so-distant future, you should probably prepare yourself for two things:

1) You’re going to have an easier time sharing your “friends list” between your social networking websites without having to give out your email address book. This also means that signing up for a new social networking website won’t be such a headache.

2) You’re going to have a harder time compartmentalizing and obscuring different parts of your life on the Internet. There will still be a place for pseudonym-based anonymity, but with all of these networks talking to each other, it’s going to be harder to hide. So if you’ve got skeletons in your public MySpace closet and you’ve just figured that nobody’s gonna look behind that door, you might wanna go clear those out now.

There’s a yucky yucky trend going on in social media right now: Asking for Address Books. This is evil. Do you hear me? EVIL!

BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD!

KNOCK IT OFF! PLEASE! JUST QUIT IT!

Okay — step back. What am I talking about. I’m talking about when you go to LinkedIn or Facebook or MySpace (or pretty much ANY of them now), and the website smiles all cutesy at you and says, “Oh, hey, I’m really glad you like our website. You know, there are probably people on here that you’ve never thought to search for, and it’s a real shame that they’re not in your network yet. But if you just give us the username and password to your Gmail account, we can check all of your friends’ email addresses against our database and find all of them for you. It’s quick, it’s easy, and your friends will thank you!”

Sounds harmless enough, right?

Don’t give it to them!

I don’t care how much you like them, or how safe they tell you they’ll keep it for you, or how much convenience they’re offering you. Your address book is your address book and it does NOT belong in the hands of a social networking website.

Why? Here’s why:

• Spam. We know it, we hate it, we’re sick of it. When you give out your address book, you give out a list of email addresses that are connected to legitimate people who use the Internet regularly, and this is very valuable to email marketers. Your social networking site will promise you that your email addresses are “safe,” but sometimes “safe” means, “We promise we’ll ONLY share it with our partner companies — you know, our hundred closest friends. And by the way, when a larger company buys us out, those rules will probably change.“
• Impersonal Invites. I’ve received invitations to social networking websites from people I’ve barely ever spoken to — people I would need to reintroduce myself to if I ran into them at a party. Why did this happen? Because those people gave up their address book to a website, and that website went ahead and invited every email address that wasn’t already in the system. If you let this happen, it can make people feel uncomfortable, and it can make you look disrespectful. The worst part is that you might not even be aware that it’s happening.
• Trust. You don’t give your friends’ phone numbers out to strangers. Please don’t give their email addresses out to a centralized database. That information is theirs to share; not yours.
• Identity Fraud. They’re asking you to give out full access to your email account when they ask for your address book. Your email account is a critical link to your internet identity. Access to it is supposed to be a SECRET!

This plays into another yucky technique (which is as old as dirt, but far more powerful with the emergence of social media): Data Mining of Personal Information.

There’s a service called Rapleaf. It allows you to plug in your email address and find out what your reputation looks like on the web. The same people run a service called UpScoop, which lets you plug in all your address book data and social networking site information to scan the profiles of everyone you know — public and private — so you can “keep up with your friends.” The same people run a service called TrustFuse, which lets email marketing campaigns check boatloads of email addresses against the Rapleaf and Upscoop database to find out lots and lots of information about the people they’re trying to get money out of. (Edit: Here’s a good analysis of the RapLeaf/UpScoop/TrustFuse drama if you want more. )

Evil, I tell you. Evil.

Do you read the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service of every website you give a username and password to? I don’t either. We like to function on trust. And if someone I respect invites me to use a service, I will often take their word for it that it’s a good service. But now I can’t do that anymore, because I don’t know for sure if they’re actually inviting me, or if some robot monster manipulated them into giving them my email address before they even had a chance to create a profile.

Social networking is a good thing — it’s doing phenomenal things for communities at an international level, and it’s important that we represent and express ourselves on the web. But please pay attention to what people are asking you for out there.

And don’t underestimate the value of your friends’ information.