ethical design?

Been thinking where that eerie feeling of my previous post (1984) comes from. It has to do with the fact that information is harvested about me and used without me being aware of it or consciously giving permission for it. I hate the idea that you must "do good" if you don't want strange people to slap you in the face with information about something you might have done (years ago and/or don't even remember). Doing good is then only based on fear, that can't be right.

I don't believe people should actively be protected from themselves, but it should be made clear that information you publish on the web might be used by others and I don't think a warning message will suffice. The complete experience of publishing information should radiate that anyone can see and use the information once you've published it.

So is regulation needed to establish some sort of level of moral or ethical use of information? I don't see that happening very soon. I think that the people/companies who create web applications (social networks, blog websites, fora etc) should have an ethical code and design in a more ethical way. Not only that, they should take responsibility and coach businesses on an ethical level while developing social web applications.

1984

It has arrived. It is not the first one, but it's definately the first big commercial peoplefinder in NL. It's wieowie.nl and it crawls google, linkedin, youtube, hyves.nl and schoolbank.nl for everything available about you and they're thinking of adding twitter, myspace, facebook and numpa.nl to the list. They are providing this information for anyone who is willing to pay for it.
I recognised something when I read about this search engine: it was that same very uncomfortable feeling that got to me when reading 1984.

So, ethics anyone? I think most people just don't care. People I talk to tell me they don't care that others can find information about them on the interweb. "I'm not doing anything weird or illegal". Yea yea, ignorance is bless. It is exactly this attitude/reason that makes this kind of businesses possible, and why people need to be protected from themselves. Most people don't even know anymore what they wrote 5 years ago on some website. That information is still available and there's a big chance it is not in it's original context anymore.

On the other hand, knowing that everything you write (and what others write about you) on the web is findable should make you think twice of sharing information or the words to use in that reaction, twitter or whatever. Thinking from that angle, will tools like this also help virtual environments to become more social? I think so. I also believe that tools like this will have their effect on the offline world, making our society more social.
Knowing that information about what you do can be made available on the web should make a person more responsible about his actions. If I would misbehave somewhere and my friends write about it online or upload some pictures (probably leaving out the context), than this can have an effect on my offline life. That can have a serious effect on your status as a valuable/ honest/ trustworthy/ etc person. Just go to perezhilton.com if you need any examples of some famous people.

So tools like this can have a positive effect on our behaviour both in the online and offline world. Unfortunately they use the same concept as used in 1984, and that does not describe a very pleasant society... hmm eerie feeling is back.