privacy | Perfect Path

Wayback Archive of my Dopplr page — Wayback archive of my dopplr page

I liked dopplr – in 2007/08, I mostly liked the idea of dopplr, it let me fantasise that I was able to travel the world, dropping in on friends, while in their town to speak at one of those shiny conferences they had then, being able to help out people in my network wherever I happened to be. By the time I’d actually built my network a bit (only a year later…) and was able to do that kind of thing, the service had been swallowed whole by Nokia, as part of the smartphone wars. It went quiet and died.

I also gradually had less of a desire to show off at big conferences and more of a yen to connect with people directly in smaller groups. My focus went more local and hyperlocal. But since working on Black Elephant, the pendulum has swung back suddenly to give me a global perspective again. It’s not that I’m going to be suddenly hopping on planes and living that fantasy life, but I heard a colleague say the other day that he thought that “being generous in supporting local community can cut you off from how the rest of the world is changing” and that rang true for me. Doing this work is opening me up to people I’ve neglected because they were far away, as well as introducing me to new folk in places I’ve never heard of before.

We’re working on two versions of the Black Elephant product (“parades”) at the moment. You can sign up for a virtual parade that happens on Zoom, but we’re also introducing more in-person events that are a bit longer and over dinner. Obviously those give you more of an opportunity to get to know other participants and they’re the best way to introduce people to the concept, but they’re relatively expensive to organise. Also, diversity can suffer. For all parades, the level of diversity at them is some function of the diversity of the host’s own network, but my gut feel is that it’s still easier to gather a group of widely diverse people online than it is in-person simply because of the logistics of getting people together in meatspace and the bigger pool of folk who are available in a range of timezones, as opposed to who’s in, say, Barcelona right now.

Wayback Archive of Dopplr's Bogotá page — Wayback Archive of Dopplr’s Bogotá page

So that’s why I’m thinking about dopplr again. I need a tool to tell me where I know people or rather, who’s currently in a particular place or easy travelling distance – I see Mike Butcher using his FB to ask this sort of question occasionally, but I’d rather have a more geographically-aware network so that if someone’s trying to set up a dinner, I can honestly say “No I don’t know anyone in Tblisi right now” or “Yes, you should speak to my friend X, they know everyone in Bogotá, let me introduce you.

Which raises the other important point – this only works if my friend X in Bogotá is happy to have me share their location. dopplr and foursquare, et al may have let everyone manage their privacy to some extent, but the shortcomings inherent in that privacy model (mainly that it such openness is much much easier for rich white straight dudes than it is for everyone else) meant that most people just couldn’t afford to play.

I don’t want a fully-automated system that only builds the value of my network at the expense of my friends. So for now, it will all have to be “manual” and slow, and rooted in conversation, and talking to people directly, making introductions the way we always have done, even if that doesn’t scale as quickly as we’d like. The model I work with is generally this:

Friend1: “Oh, do you know Friend2? I’d really like to speak with them.”

Me: “Sure, I’ll let them have your details, if that’s OK, and they can decide whether they want to be in touch, let me know how it goes”

Maybe it will always have to be like that, in order to maintain the trust, or maybe, by paying close attention to what we’re doing we might find a way of doing it in partnership and for mutual benefit.

About 10 years ago when I got my first digital camera to play with at work, I considered a project documenting London’s streets. The idea was that you would stand on a street corner and take a picture in each direction, and then upload it to a database with some metadata so that we could build a rich visual map of London so that if you were headed to say a bar or restaurant you could find a picture of the local area so that when you popped up out of the tube, you’d have a better chance of finding what you wanted.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t do it, mainly because devising instructions for how to take your photographs and constructing a metadata scheme that could accurately but simply describe any street corner in London proved way too complex. Plus the web was a very different kind of place – this was an information retrieval system, not a social one. Oh yeah and forget GPS, who was strong enough or rich enough to carry a GPS receiver around with them? Nonetheless, it would have been cool, right? I think the early podwalks had a similar inspiration.

Now the smart people at Google have caught up with my brilliant vision 🙂

And (nearly) everybody hates it.

In my opinion, Google Maps Streetview is just a rich enhancement to a map. I have used it to identify places I was going (in Paris, France and Austin, Texas) to get a feel for what sort of neighbourhood they were in and to understand better how I might walk there.

I don’t understand the privacy concerns that people have. Assuming you’ve been (un)lucky enough to be photographed by a car, what are the chances of anyone who knows you seeing it? And in the event that you (or some top-secret piece of your property) are snapped and you find out about it, then you can ask for it to be removed. This seems to me to be way beyond the power we have with CCTV in that 1. We can see it. and 2. We can get it removed. It’s ironic really that when a private company does it, we get to have a say, but when our democratically elected councils or government agencies do it, we don’t even have access.

What do you lose by having your home or car photographed? (mine isn’t there incidentally, they haven’t got beyond the A24 in Epsom) I’m not saying it’s nothing, just honestly trying to understand what it is.

Yes, I can imagine it leading to an imagined worse outcome of the BNP list leak last year, with the list “enhanced” with links to pictures of the outside of each member’s house. But the mashups there were pretty well regulated, once the first few had been done, people realised what a silly thing it was to do and what a dangerous precedent it was.

Before it came to the UK (and by the way, it’s only in selected cities), I’d used the Parisian and Texan versions to look at places I was just about to go to – working out how to walk there without having to cross 10 lanes of traffic etc.

I’ve also used it to look at places that I may never get to see, like parts of the Northern Territories in Australia (can’t remember how we ended up there…)

And it also works well for showing people places I’ve been and explaining something visual.

And as Russell points out, it’s good for the nostalgic – Places I used to live that are just the same and places I used to live that are very different.

I’m also interested in what’s not covered – No great views of Buckingham Palace for example and great chunks of the West End are missing including Oxford Street and Cavendish Sq.