Is Privacy on the Social Web a Technical Problem?

How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this year's SXSW — and not just in researcher Danah Boyd's keynote address that argued aggregating public information can be a privacy breach, and slammed Google and Facebook for their missteps with users' expectations.

Is privacy just a technical problem? That's what Google engineer Brett Slatkin, co-creator of the PubSubHubbub real-time syndication protocol, proposed on a Saturday morning panel. WebFinger, a cross-platform standard that conveys user preferences, which could include explicit privacy settings from one social network to another, could take care of understanding the relationships between users and the information they want to control, Slatkin said. He added that he felt that the reason users are confused about privacy is because of inconsistency among the social sites they use.