Link farming and a bad case of Scrapies

The latest worry about Social Network scraping is from the Google API....Read/Write Web has a summary of the latest outbreak of Scrapies,

The Social Graph API lets developers draw connections between your friends on one service and your friends on another. It indexes XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) data, standard microformats that publishers like Twitter or Facebook can append to your friend relationships inside their services.

Best (unintenional?) quote is from Tim O'Reilly:

Tim O'Reilly is balls-to-the-wall about the post-privacy future. "It’s a lot like the evolutionary value of pain," he says. "Search (searching the social graph) creates feedback loops that allow us to learn from and modify our behavior. A false sense of security helps bad actors more than tools that make information more visible."

In other words over time we'll learn what to expose and what not to....but the thing is, today's SocNets are so crass, so un-nuanced that you pretty much give away the farm at first scrape - its all out there, you can't hide (or elect not to share) nearly anything.

Tim goes on to say, somewhat blithely:

The net is getting to the level of complexity where we need to approach it as a living thing rather than an engineered object. While we can make better or worse design decisions, we're not going to capture every eventuality

No, but it is fairly predictable that scrapers will try and take every opportunity to capture us if its made easy. I can't understand why Web Generation 2.0 pastes it all up on the 'Net, Generation 1.0 wasn't that dim, and it sounds like no-one's expecting Generation 3.0 to be so either.

There are some basic safeguards - no real names, just nom de plumes. Different names on each SocNet. No personal contact details (put in a hotmail/yahoo/gmail freemail addy). Make yourself private wherever possible. And avoid any SocNet that tries to monetise by scraping you itself.

At least that way its harder to aggregate you across your various SocNets....