Marshall wrote a post about MyBlogLog this evening over at TechCrunch. Many bloggers will find the service compelling because it shows you recent visitors to your blog, and if someone visits your blog a certain number of times (default is 10 times), they become “admirers,” which is sort of like being added as a friend in a social network. I spent quite a bit of time browsing through various blogs, seeing who was reading what.
They track users via a cookie and when you visit a blog that is in the mybloglog system, it notes it. That’s where my concern arises.
Lots of sites add cookies to visitors for one reason or another, and certainly lots of questionable things are done with the data collected. But far fewer sites that cookie me also get me to voluntarily give away personal information (and mybloglog requests a lot of information, although almost none of it is required for registration). And as far as I know, NONE of those sites publish data collected by the cookie to a publicly available web page along with my personal information.
But MyBlogLog does. And I’m not sure I like that.
Their privacy policy is pretty clear on the fact that they do this – “It places your profile picture on the faces of certain of the sites you read. Site-by-site control of where your profile picture appears will be provided, but is not available yet.” And they also provide a link to opt-out of having data collected about what sites you visit (link is in the privacy policy).
I also emailed with Scott Rafer, one of the founders, this evening about this issue. He says “it appears less likely that we’ll ever actually get into the data sales business. There’s too many other opportunities that are less controversial. We’ll certainly never sell any personal data or individual clickstreams whatsoever.”
I’m glad to hear that, and I trust Scott to do the right thing. Still, I turned off the data collection and display feature for my account at MyBlogLog. I guess I haven’t gotten so used to the notion that all of our privacy is already dead that I am comfortable seeing my name and sites I’ve visited on a publicly available website.
So for now I am enjoying seeing what sites everyone else is visiting (and I love the fact that this person is a TechCrunch reader), but I’m not going to give away the sites that I visit just yet.
Agreed and funny ending.
PS – she likes me too
I agree that giving away your ‘clickstream’ as it were is probably a bit too much information. It is far too granular and ‘high-resolution’.
That’s why we are working on the APML (www.apml.org) format. The idea is to convert a clickstream and other high-resolution types of user breadcrumbs (email, files, opml etc) into a simple set of ranked interests.
It’s more portable, less granular and – with an identity and authentication layer – could be very useful for users when importing/exporting their profiles just like they do with their reading lists via OPML.
@ Michael — Thanks for taking a close look, but there’s a different part of the Privacy Policy that is more important in addressing your comment:
When you visit a site that is using MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers widget, our system will add your profile picture to the widget, where it will be displayed for a period of time. The only way that the site knows that you have visited is to view the widget as you can. No person-specific information is provided to the site in any other way.
there are clearly some websites that people may not want to show that they visit (politics, porn, gossip, etc). i think you ought to be able to opt out by domain or by category.
another thing that should be pointed out is the only way your photo shows up is if you have a profile on mybloglog.
and many people who have profiles in my community (about 500 so far) use avatars and handles so there is certainly an easy way to be anonymous and also an active member of the community.
i love this service. it’s the best thing that i’ve added to my blog in the past year for sure and i get value out of it every day as do many of my readers.
i would encourage you to add reader roll to the front page of your crunch blogs.
fred
Just a heads up — porn is already silo’d so people can’t find themselves on an adult site. Feel free to sign up for MyBlogLog and surf adult sites with confidence in your anonymity.
The bottom line is there’s clearly something creepy about having your picture pop up on a blog you visit, for all the world to see, without you fully intending it to.
I originally registered for MyBlogLog b/c I saw the other side of it – pics of folks I ‘knew’ popping on Craig Cmheil’s blog. Not sure most people will instantly realize that they are also losing a lot of anonymity and some privacy when they sign up for this ‘cool widget’.
Having said that, now that I know, I have’t turned off the display feature.
People do have the option of deleting their cookies – if they are truly concerned – or using an online Proxy.
But perhaps the theory is that Web 2.0 techies would want to network with one another – and would have no problem being open about what they visit.
This is an innovative form of Web 2.0 Viral Marketing