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A few months ago I discovered the beautiful world of online bookmarking (also commonly referred to as social bookmarking). Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. Not only will I never again be missing that one funky bookmark that I saved on my computer at home when I'm at my mates place drinking lager and dancing on the tables, I can also categorise my bookmarks using tags. After having used del.icio.us for a few weeks something started to nag in my mind though.
Have you ever asked yourself this: How private are my bookmarks? Not to your friends. Not to other fellow Internet surfers (including myself) or not even to a perfect stranger. No, I am talking about corporations. Companies that exist for the sole purpose of making money for their stockholders and owners. Yahoo recently bought del.icio.us. Ask yourself how useful that big'ol database of del.icio.us is to a corporate company. I'd rather they read my e-mail to be honest. Think of how a corporation like Yahoo (or any other in the same league) can use that database. As the sole owner of the database, you'd literally know the exact interests, preferences, likes and dislikes of say 100,000+ people. In many ways (and for a great many corporate-thinking people), that translates to one big powerful toolkit for analyzing consumer behaviour and habits, not to mention preferences of brands and other material consumer products. They could even see all of these things in relation to your geographical position using IP-addresses and DNS.
Luckily -- especially if you run your own server or rented wed host -- there are open source, non-comercial options. I just recently found the Scuttle project, a project hosted by well known SourceForge.net.
My real concern, at the end of the day , is really that I wonder how many people that truly understand what they are contributing to by using the free services of del.icio.us and the likes.
