The Behavioral Targeting debate continues. At the heart of the debate is the simple cookie. This is not new technology. However, this simple tracking, analytics technique has now elevated to sophisticated behavioral tracking networks. In the ultimate end game here, many would like to see the cookie crumble … others would just like you to exercise choice and clear your browser so they can clear their conscience.

Central to the debate is the balance between privacy & engagement – and the assumption that they are polar opposites. They’re not. We can have privacy AND engagement. I’ll blog more on this in the coming months.

Peter Whoriskey, Staff Writer from The Washington Post captures the ongoing debate sentiment in "FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You."

More on the big three announcements … Facebook’s Connect, Google’s Friend Connect and MySpace’s Data Availability. In short, it is all about data control and extending their ‘social influence’ to other web sites to capture more and more data for the social graph … and no doubt to bolster the value of their underlying revenue streams.

Each of the services proposes keeping their member’s data on their servers – no shock there. Their version of ‘open’ is via the use of widgets, applications or iFrames – however, they all have the same strategy – extend the reach and control more data.

The early pitches from the big three (going back to Facebook's announcements in 2006) were based on the ‘Social Cloud’ and integration via simple REST APIs. The tune has changed now to integration via widgets, applications or iFrames under a “let-me-do/outsource-it-for-you” approach … we’ll just make it easy for you to inter-operate with our data using standards such as OpenID, OAuth, etc.

If you buy this approach, then you accept the fact that it is OK for Facebook, MySpace, Google, et. al. to control more of your data …

A business colleague sent me a link this week to an article in Baseline Magazine entitled “Multiple Online Personas: The Choice of a New Generation” by Chris Gonsalves. Good article – especially the introductory paragraph outlining the same individual with three separate personas.

Didn’t take the buzz machine over at Gartner long to coin a new term – Generation V. As reported by Gonsalves, “the new Generation V (the “V” is for “virtual” according to Gartner) is not defined by age, gender or geography. Instead, it is based on achievement, accomplishments and a growing preference for digital media when it comes to learning and sharing.”

Refer YouTube video clip below explaining Google Friend Connect BETA ... Does anyone notice any permsissions associated with sharing and connecting 'friend' data to the third party web site? Seems like you need to opt-in to join the guacamole recipe website - and you can send invites to friends ... but the permissions on adding friends and sharing friend data?

A week after the “big” announcements about commitment to being open, seems like not everyone in the sand box wants to play nice. The issue? Facebook has taken their bucket and spade and decided to Opt-Out of Google’s Friend Connect.

TechCrunch’s Steve Gillmor has put together the must read article on the issue entitled “Facebook’s Glass Jaw”…

Facebook’s rationale is that Friend Connect “redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.” Give me a break. Can anyone say Beacon?

Err, let me understand this … It’s OK if Facebook does this with exactly the same API with Facebook applications to enable their users to share data with sites and applications they choose … however, as Gillmor states “…somehow Friend Connect does its dirty work without users’ knowledge”.

Food for thought ...

Facebook responded quickly to MySpace Data Availablity (partnering with Yahoo!, EBay and Twitter) ...

Refer link to Facebook Develepers, "Announcing Facebook Connect" by David Morin on Friday May 9th at 12:32pm.

Expect a lot of discussion around who has the most Dataportability compliant effort ... The battle lines will be drawn over data ownership, access and privacy ... Refer first article from David Recorden (Open Platforms Tech Lead at SixApart) entitled "MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability" over at O'Reilly Radar ...

Let the games begin.

Let me apologize in advance for this essay, rather than blog. I’ll also post more entries on this topic over the coming weeks …

I toyed with two different titles for this blog. I settled on Go Big or Go Home – the other, Dataportability.org’s Standards Mashup is equally appropriate.

Dataportability.org, led by Chris Saad, has a big vision - boil the ocean big, not Texas big. The first victory has been to get the major players on board – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Plaxo, SixApart, LinkedIn. The second is to garner support from the multiple tangential (and in some instances, competing) standards initiatives who can dogpile into this venn diagram intersect …

The “big three” however are announcing their own initiatives:

As long as we continue to make advancements with internet technology there will always be someone trying to figure out how to hack, crack or game the technology. The most recent victim is the CAPTCHA … Refer article entitled “Digital Deception” by The Washington Post Staff Writer, Peter Whoriskey that summarizes the state of the problem.

What is a CAPTCHA you may well ask? Refer below for an example of Carnegie Mellon’s version - ReCAPTCHA – they’ve been popping up everywhere across the web.

CAPTCHA - Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

The primary purpose is to prevent abuse from automated programs (bots) usually written to generate spam, blogspam, pingspam, etc. It works on the basis that a computer program cannot read distorted text as well as humans – the bots cannot then traverse the web site.

Facebook - Err, my bad. However, refer terms of use ... oh, and we have teams that look for this type of stuff (well, after the horse has bolted) ... Roll to the video and tell me you're comfortable putting personally identificably information on Facebook ...

Refer below for the YouTube version of the BBC article on their Hong Kong web site ...

Or, go to the BBC Web Site for the version that wasn't uploaded to YouTube Hong Kong.