Seikilos Blog

After hearing all about Janet Jackson case, and thinking on and on again about how "family values" destroyed the American freedom (one of their favourite words), I thought on writing about that, but as many other already people did, I only will have some fun and copy what Elaine from Seinfeld once said, in a different context, but that fits perfectly here:

"I did not bare myself deliberately, but I tell you: I wish now that I had, because it is not me that has been exposed, but you! For I have seen the nipple on your soul!"

Well, I suppose I have to comment about Orkut, as every blogger has done in the last weeks. I guess the best I can do is a brief of what the others already said, and then contrast some data I found myself. So, on the one hand the critics: there's a huge concern about privacy, about what Orkut (Google) wants about your profile and what they can do with it. We read in Orkut's privacy policy:

By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.

This means they can do whatever they want to with your personal data. There's a lot of information you submit to Orkut on registration, and as you enter Orkut only if you've been invited, everone wants to be invited. What could Google possible do with your profile? Some people suggested Google will keep track of what you search, to later associate those queries to your profile, and sell that information to marketing companies, in the shape of "white, Caucasian males between 20 and 30 searched for the term 'britney spears' a hundred times a day", or worse: "this is the list of people that searched for the name of your company this month: here you have their names, e-mails, addresses, telephone numbers... even there's some interesting chick here among them that's looking for a date: he has to be 30, no smoker, good looking...".
All of that sounds reasonable enough, it's pretty clear that Google has some strong commercial intentions behind Orkut, and that those intentions are in the data mining field. However, I still use Orkut. Living in the third world has its advantages: no big, American company is interested in a distant person living in Argentina who has no first world money to spend. I met interesting people there, so being in Orkut for a week wasn't a waste of time. What strikes me about the privacy worries is that I found several Open Source gurus inside: Asa Dotzler (from the Mozilla team), Miguel de Icaza (creator of Gnome, now cloning Microsoft's .NET for Linux), people that are regarded as leaders, and that can be easily seen in their friends' list (huge, with three figure numbers). If Orkut's so bad, what are they doing inside Orkut? If they advocate to Free Software, why do they use a proprietary system that will use you to earn money?
Anothing interesting thing: in Orkut, just like in Kafka's Oklahoma Circus or in John Wilkins' analytical language, you have to "catalog" yourself in categories. So I put me among the musicians, in particular with the cellists, those who look for other musicians to compose music through internet, those who use computers to compose music. Besides composing music, I listen to it, so you'll find me there among those who listen to Beethoven, Bartók, Pink Floyd, Mahler, Portishead... I like to read as well, so I created the Borges category, while I am among those who like Kafka. I also like humour, so there I am with the Monty Python lovers and with the Les Luthiers lovers. In the cinema field I created the Greenaway lobby, but I am also listed with those who love the so called "Foreign Cinema", and Herzog. As I am a programmer, I love "vi" and Open Source and Mozilla. Geographically speaking I also can be categorized inside those who live in Buenos Aires (we were the first Argentineans to enter Orkut), those who love Bulgaria, those who listen to European folklore... You see that such categorization (and the list of your friends) can define more your personality than all what Google asks you to fill in the profile card. When you meet a new person there, such heterogeneous list of "I belong to" can give you an immediate idea of who's he/she. As people can create categories themselves (as I did with Borges and Greenaway), some they don't look for a previous entry, and often there are several "communities" (as they are called inside Orkut) about the same topic: there are, for example, two about Monty Python, with the same title. As Orkut is still very young, today the "community system" is not a chaos yet, but soon it will be. There's no big deal happening inside the communities, as Orkut intended, but people use those just to attach themselves yet another label to describe them.