Schneier on Social Media Data

Useful piece from Bruce Shneier (seen on Media Influencer):

Below is my taxonomy of social networking data, which I first presented at the Internet Governance Forum meeting last November, and again -- revised -- at an OECD workshop on the role of Internet intermediaries in June.

- Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.

- Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

- Entrusted data is what you post on other people's pages. It's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over the data once you post it -- another user does.

- Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over it, and you didn't create it in the first place.

- Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.

- Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you're likely gay yourself.

There are other ways to look at user data. Some of it you give to the social networking site in confidence, expecting the site to safeguard the data. Some of it you publish openly and others use it to find you. And some of it you share only within an enumerated circle of other users. At the receiving end, social networking sites can monetize all of it: generally by selling targeted advertising.

Not quite certain where location data fits in, in fact I think there is a whole emerging arena of data that various tracking systems capture about you from your online activities. I suppose it could be Behavioural data, but I think its more about Tracking Data than Behavioural per se, as you cannot abstract a behaviour easily from it.