MediaBerkman

Radio Berkman 147: Digital Hermits and the People Who Scare Them (Adventures in Anonymity III)

April 2nd, 2010

Some people guard their privacy online jealously. As much as they want free email and facebook, they shudder at thoughts of having their data scraped, email addresses exposed, and photos indexed.

But the trend of web services is not in favor of these digital hermits. More and more social networks and applications are popping up, allowing users to trade their personal information for cheap and amazing services.

One such service – Blippy.com – is like a Twitter for your debit card. Sign up with Blippy, and you can immediately and automatically share info about what you buy, watch, and listen to with your own social network or the whole world.

David Hornik loves Blippy. He loves the trend towards radical transparency. And as an investor with August Capital – who’ve helped give life to successful startups like evite and stumbleupon – he’s got his eye on where this trend could be going.

And by the way, you can follow what David purchases at his public blippy account.

Listen:
or download
…also in Ogg!

Reference Section:
Fear for your privacy? Here’s a couple of thought provoking resources.

Previous Episodes in this thread:
Adventures in Anonymity Part II: The Future of Transparency and How to Stop It – Joel Reidenberg of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham on re-engineering the web to fight transparency’s most dangerous effects
Adventures in Anonymity Part I – Sam Bayard, Assistant Director of the Citizen Media Law Project on whether legal action could put online anonymity out of commission

CC Music this week:

Photo courtesy of Flickr user alancleaver2000

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Entry Filed under: audio,radioberkman