Social Media & Privacy

I realize that last week I chose to write about social media as it pertains to OmniEXP, but I felt as if I would do the project a better service if I chose to write about the follow up lecture on Social Media Privacy rather than the other material, because it really pertains to OmniEXP in such a strong way, the project being a hypothetical social media website, as well as because privacy is such an important subject both in the realm of social media, and in the realm of video games. Just this past year we saw evidence of that with the attacks on the PlayStation Network and the devastating consequences it had not only for Sony but for third party developers developing for the PlayStation 3 and, really, for the industry as a whole.

The internet is a scary place, especially the portions filled with bored nerds with too much free time and eager for quick thrills. Unfortunately, that also happens to be the key target demographic for OmniEXP. So one might be able to understand why taking these bored, vindictive, anonymous nerds and setting them loose in a social media population also filled with innocent regular folks might raise some concerns, to say the least.

To compensate for this, OmniEXP would have to feature very robust privacy settings that allow for a lot of customization. We still might want to allow people the option to allow public access to more personal information such as full names, locations, etc. But we should make it very clear to people from the get-go that putting yourself out there in such a way carries with it very real risks, and maybe even configure the settings so that individual users have the opportunity to opt-in to those settings, instead of opt out.

Personal privacy is a hallmark of the gaming community. If you're not gaming on your own or with your friends, chances are you're gaming with total strangers masked by non-specific handles, with almost no other information about them. The gaming community has been very slowly moving towards a more social atmosphere, with voice communication, user profiles, and friends lists, but OmniEXP wouldn't be a gaming website if we didn't keep that option for near-anonymity available for the end user.